Thank you very much. I am Colin Crowell, Managing Director of the Blue Owl group, which is a global consultancy, made up of 17 consultants around the world as part of a collective. We are all former members of the Twitter 1.0 public policy team. We have a collective, here in the US and in 11 countries around the world that work on technology. I'm going to talk today about Internet geopolitics. And I'm going to try to do this briskly because people who know me know I could go on for a very long time on topics like this, but this is a lightning talk. So, I'm gonna have to speak wicked fast.
So, one focus area is multistakeholderism, and to talk about the first era of Internet tech policy, and then where we are today, and try to look at some similar threads and commonalities and things that have changed over time. But in order to understand the first era of Internet policy and how it might be different from today, you have to go back to the 1990s, and one of the distinguishing characteristic was that there was legislation back then. And that it is one key distinguishing characteristic. Those of you who are of a certain vintage will recognize this slide. But if you look at the first era of Internet policymaking, there were two things that were driving changes in the 90s. One was the rapid transition technologies from analog to digital. That is what's happening in cable, in telephony, broadcasting, satellite, wireless communications, all parts of our communications tech framework, policy framework that is siloed into different areas with distinct services and distinctly regulated. But because all the technologies are going digital, they could cross pollinate across the different networks, and you have sort of this ability of different networks different communications medium to offer similar types of content and services. Second thing was of course the rise of the Internet. In 1991, Congress voted to approve the commercial public use of what was then called the National Research Education Network. And that created an opportunity very shortly thereafter for the rise of the commercial and public Internet. So go look at the 90s and factor in those two issues. Here's the 1990s era legislation. This is not an exhaustive list. This is an illustrative list. But each of these had a impact on the Internet ecosystem. The Cable Act of 92 cretaed the 18 inch visual satellite competition to incumbent cable companies with a better picture quality, introducing cable to beginning upgrading their networks from analog to digital. Cable Act 1992 also vitiated all exclusive franchise agreements in municipalities across the country. When we think of debates today around pre-emption, that is as extensive a pre-emption as Congress ever did. created the Digital Wireless marketplace in the United States. Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement was that the fact that law enforcement couldn't take alligator clips and put them on Cotter telephone virus or wiretaps, because we're going on fiber optic cables and heart attacks and they need assistance from telecom companies to to get that work. Cut up to 1996, of course, is the overhaul of communication sites in the United States. That included everything from the 7232, the radio program that brought the Internet into the K through 12 schools, lotteries, the DMCA remains underlying statute for how copyright is handled, not just in the US apparently, almost everywhere around the world. And the Child Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998. affects kids 12 and under, there's a 2.0 version pending in Congress now, that law is 25 years old, and it remains the only Internet specific privacy law Congress has passed. 25 yeard old now.
So one thing that's interesting about that list of a major telecom and Internet related laws that are passed in the 1990s is the following. It is axiomatic in Washington these days, when people say nothing's going to pass Congress in an election year. It used to be that the Congress only passed major Internet related laws during election years. Only one of them isn't during an election year. But check this out. Sorry, from the bottom, Child Online Privacy Protection Act passed in October of 1998. DMCA passed in October of 1998. CALEA, Communications Assistance for the Law Enforcement Act passed in October of 1994, Cable Act of 1992 passed in October of 1992. So, all of them passed just weeks before election day. So, it took Congress in a bipartisan basis, you know, almost an entire Congress to get things done. But because this suite of issues was largely non partisan, or more bipartisan, that was today, we were able to work through pages of your congress culminating in putting laws on books that, taken together, created the Internet ecosystem that we now have here in the United States today. So, that's the difference between that era and this era. These were the players at the time. One of the things we look at this list for Internet related issues is that, at the time that most of those laws were being considered, these companies were small. They were not really politically impactful corporate entities here. They weren't actively involved, many of them, in the sort of the fundraising apparatus of Washington, they were relatively small compared to what they evolved to become, but also compared to the sort of lobbying firmament of Washington. That's different from today.
Civil society at the time, you see how there was sort of groundswell of organizations that were created at the time to begin working on Internet related digital technology issues. So you see that there was a suite of things. And so certainly, the Internet Engineering Task Force began in 1986, but rose to importance in the 90s. But most of these were sort of born out of that milieu in the 90s, when these issues were coming to the fore. Multistakeholder organizations and civil society organizations, compared to the Internet companies of that era, were on a more equal footing to engage in public policy debates here in Washington, as a result. You look at today, some of these companies are among the biggest companies in the world, actively engaged in public policy conversations around AI, for example, and sort of the biases of policy makers have flipped. in an earlier era, Congress and policy makers were dealing and arbitrated with sort of large industries around policies. And so the Internet ecosystem, the younger companies, the more entrepreneurial companies that were coming up, came up and we're basically the beneficiaries of government action.
Oftentimes, today, you hear, Well, you know, Congress, government can't keep up with the pace of technology. In an earlier era, it was the government that was the prime mover, the first mover, that created the climate and policy conducive to investments, entrepreneurial entry, and competition. Government was moving faster than it had to at first, in order to create that ecosystem, that climate, in policy. So the framework was established first by government, and then companies took advantage of the fact that government was unshackling markets that had been more monopolistic in certain cases, or [inaudible]. Now, were all those laws [inaudible]? Were all of the multistakeholder organizations that were created, and working then. No. They weren't needed. I remember my boss on Capitol Hill, he was a house member at the time, and currently the Senator Markey of Massachusetts, we held a hearing on ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. And he said, you know, ICANN is sort of like for Internet governance is like the definition Winston Churchill had about democracy. It's the worst form of Internet governance, except for other forms of Internet governance. Those are the early days.
So, over time Web 1/0 shifts to Web 2.0, and you start to see the companies getting better. And the companies start to have a disproportionate sway over policy, governments sit on the sidelines, multistakeholder groups are diluted in their in their impact. What did we miss? We changed our laws to digital to analog, we unshackled, granted [inaudible] to investment in innovation. But we never did the same for governance. We never changed the law to migrate the Federal Communications Commission from a 1934 era agency, to one fit for purpose of the new era that [inaudible]. Even today, policymaking on tech across the US government is split, divided. it is in OCP NEC NSA, It is in the Trademarks Office, it's in the Commerce Department, NTIA, NIST, FTC, DOJ antitrust. So, it's really spread out, and there's no one singular agency that sort of fit for purpose. That was something that could have be dealt with in the 90s, to begin that process, and never was done. As a result, what has to happen today, we have to issue executive orders to cast all these different parts of the government to do the job. And so that's one result that... We never looked at climate impacts and energy use. And then we didn't look at privacy data protection for adults, but did get it for 12 and under
What can we do today? So if you take what's happened from Web 1.0, through Web 2.0, and now theres Web 3.0. For Web 2.0, I was head of Global Policy of Twitter, and so I was like Twitter Secretary of State, and Twitter started to act as a quasi sovereign entity over the services provided. We have what was like diplomatic relations with goverments, and government representatives. And governments also started to make that shift. Denmark granted atech ambassador role to Silicon Valley in 2017. Establishing quasi diplomatic relations with Northern California. So, this was a dynamic that was taken over but [inaudible] multi stakeholder processes, addressing governance questions around AI earlier rather than later because later may be too late, and coordinate multilateral fora for AI because it involves other goverments immediately, rather than an earlier era when the US largely drove Internet policy making. So with that, I'm done. Thank you.
