My name is Tim Lordan. I'm the executive director of the Internet Education Foundation, which coordinates the State of the Net conference. Welcome to the 20th annual State of the Net, which seems to me to be insane, because I didn't think we'd get to the second annual. But, that's a totally different story.
I'd like to make a profound statement today about what 20 years means, where we are, and what point in time on Internet policy we are in right now. Looking back over the last 20 years of Internet policy, the ebb and flow, some things are totally new in our space. We're calling this conference 'The Next Ppoch of Internet Policy', because we feel like something fundamentally is happening with Internet policy, and the next 20 years are going to be even more exciting than the last 20 years.
That said, a lot of the issues that we dealt with 20 years ago, are still in play today. Last year, like 20 years ago, we were talking about the digital divide. Front and center this year. We're at an incredibly important inflection point in history when it comes to connecting every American to broadband Internet. It was the same questions as we were having 20 years ago. Intellectual property, very important 20 years ago, we're seeing the emergence of that issue this year, and you see that reflected in the entire program that we have here today. A lot of the other issues, like cybersecurity, same as they are then, they are now. Privacy, as well.
But, it is a fundamentally different time, and we're really excited to host this conference. I'm not going to go into a lot of details about how I feel about the issues, because that's not my job, my job is to curate conversations about them. The program will reflect all of the things that we're thinking about when it comes to this point in time in Internet policy. I think, in the coming months, we'd like to kind of host a conversation about the inflection point that we're in, in this next epoch of Internet policy, and we'll invite you to that as well. So, we want to have a follow up at this conference, to focus more on kind of this point in time, to kind of mark the 20 years. So, look out for that,
I have some housekeeping I want to do. The schedule is much bigger than it was last year, we've introduced lightning talks, and we've introduced salons at the end of the day. The schedule is at sotn2024.sched.com. It's posted all over the place. There's an app called Schedule that you can use to look at the schedule. It looks a little complicated, but you'll figure it out. We have a lot of programming, we're really excited about the lightning talks and all the people that volunteered. 100 people sent in proposals for lightning talks and slots, and we could only accommodate something like 18 of them. So, please, I want to thank everybody that sent in a lightning talk proposal, and a salon proposal, I'm sorry, we couldn't accommodate all of them. We need a bigger space, but that's a different topic.
I need to thank some of the sponsors and my board members. We passed out at the front desk a list of the board members that we have, and we're very grateful for them. You'll see them come up throughout the day introducing different people, and I want to thank them. But, one thing I have to thank is the sponsors, because without people willing to sponsor this conference, and sponsor a conversation that has a lot of robust debate, and not everybody agrees on the topics here, it's really incredible that people would come out to sponsor and allow us to curate this debate, and they include Comcast, TikTok, Meta, NetChoice, Netflix, Pepsi, Verizon, Workday, Amazon, AT&T, Discord, Lumen, INCOMPAS, Internet Society, NCTA, Network On, Public Interest Registry, Stand Together, Venable, American University, and I want to send a special thank you to Glen Echo Group. A lot of the graphics you see around the space and online are the result of Glen Echo group's amazing public relations and media affairs team. They're incredible. We could not have done this conference without them, so I want to thank Maura Corbett, Amy Schatz, and her team for an amazing job.
That's pretty much it for the housekeeping, with the exception of four people. There's a donate button when you register for this conference, and last year one person did made a donation to us, and we're a 501(c)3 and I was very grateful. This year, four people made a donation to us, and I'm like that's a four fold increase, and I'm really excited about that. Mike Nelson, Matt Wood, Shelly Sandoval, and Dan Luber are my personal heroes this year. Thank you so much.
And now, forgive me for prattling on, but let me introduce Alan Davidson, who's the Assistant Secretary of Commerce. He's the Principal Adviser to the President on Telecom and Information Policy. NTIA is one of my favorite agencies in town. I used to work there a long time ago, and the issues were not as huge as they are facing NTIA today. Alan is like a renaissance man of Internet policy, he's been everywhere, he's done everything, he's been at Mozilla, he's been at New America, Google. He's been at the Department of Commerce even, before. A lot of people don't know that. Alan holds an engineering degree from MIT, as well as a law degree from Yale Law School.
Most importantly, when I met Alan, he was working for CDT and they are our father organization, they created this organization, for which we are grateful. Alan, at the time this conference was conceived, was our board treasurer, so he's largely to blame for all of this. So, he's going to be doing a fireside chat with Cat Zakrzewski from the Washington Post. She's the national tech policy reporter, and she was the first anchor of the Tech Policy 202 at the Washington Post. So, Cat, Alan, please.
