Hi, welcome, my name is Tim Lordan. I'm the executive director of the Internet Education Foundation, and we curate the state of that conference. Glad you're joined us. This is our 17th annual conference, which we created in 2005 to kind of explore internet policy issues. It is our first virtual conference, due to COVID which unfortunately is the case we're sorry that you can't join us in person, but we're hopeful, with a lot of hard work and a little bit of luck you'll be able to join us in person next year in 2022. It's unfortunate that we're not able to do this in person, but it is great that internet technology has allowed us to do this, which we would not have been able to do in 2005, when we first created this conference in fact we actually streamed, the first ever say the net conference in 2005 on real networks video player, I doubt anybody remembers what that is, but that was the technology of the day. So we're thrilled that zoom and YouTube and all these other tools exist and we're able to connect and discuss these issues that are extremely important.
The Internet Education Foundation takes new positions on legislation and the or, or the issues that we're discussing today where policy agnostic organization but we're hopeful about the internet, as I said, we're thrilled that the internet has allowed us to have a virtual conference in lieu of a real conference. So we are very hopeful but we don't take positions on legislation we simply curate debates around critical issues and hopefully allow you to share different views and hear different perspectives on on the policy issues. So we're very excited that you joined us. We have two days of programming, we go from 11am to some time after five o'clock today. We'll pick up tomorrow, Wednesday at 11am and go through until the early evening, and the links to your schedule are on the agenda that we sent out, you can click on any one of those panels or keynotes and find a zoom link that you can access that that there's only two zoom links, one for Tuesday and one for Wednesday, so there are specific zoom links for each panel. Please join along the conversation and posts on Twitter using the hashtag lb. So tn 2021, and we are at. S o tn, which is our Twitter account. Um, I think I also should mention the fact that my board of directors allows us to host policy agnostic events and discussions, like this and it's really incredible that such a great group of folks have allowed us to kind of be very neutral, about these policy issues when it doesn't seem like there's a lot of neutrality these days. So we're really excited about that I'm really grateful. And we also have a great group of sponsors that sponsors to the net. With with the idea that we're going to host different perspectives and different points of views on some of the toughest issues that we have, we have Comcast NBC Universal as a sponsor in addition to Facebook horizon. amazon. at&t, ncta, Twitter, Venable century CenturyLink lumen, and the Internet Society DC chapter is webcasting this to their members. And we have a great outside group called Glen echo group that's helping us with communications Media Relations and overall promotion and Glen echo is great if you ever get a chance to hire them. So, moving on. As I said, this is a really tough time because of COVID. 500,000 Americans have passed away. It's a really devastating time. And we wanted to start off the conference by exploring some of the issues that COVID has presented in the context of intranet policy. Recently, Congresswoman Anna Eshoo who happens to be the co chair of the Congressional internet caucus sent a letter to the Biden transition team morning that disinformation around COVID vaccines could have a devastating impact and a real significant mortality impact, with regard to the American people. Congresswoman Eshoo has been leading on COVID vaccine misinformation, which literally could kill 10s of 1000s, if we don't get ahead of it. So, Congresswoman Eshoo has been on the forefront of this. She will be our opening keynote speaker, and she'll be followed by an amazing group of researchers and other experts, talking about COVID misinformation, with regard to the vaccine, and how we can get ahead of it because when it comes to disinformation as we found is very hard to unscramble the eggs, or, for that matter, put the genie back in the bottle. And we need to get past COVID so we can get the economy back and running, and we can enjoy avoid, needless deaths. So, with that, I'd like to introduce Congresswoman Anna Eshoo, who is again the co chair of the Congressional Black Caucus one thing you may not know is that every Congress every two years. Congresswoman Eshoo the, and her counterpart in the congressional internet caucus caucus create the congressional app challenge, which allows students around the country, high school, middle school students to code an app, and submit it to win their districts congressional app challenge over 300 members of the House of Representatives hosted a competition in their districts, and it is an official coding competition of the house, and she has sold shown great leadership on that, and we expect another two years of the Congressional app challenge this year. So with that I'd like to welcome Congresswoman Anna Eshoo who is on the powerful Energy and Commerce subcommittee. Energy and Commerce Committee, and she's also the chairwoman of the health subcommittee of the Energy and Commerce Committee. She's from the 18th represents the 18th District of California. And we're thrilled to have her as our co chair. And as our opening keynote speaker today so to start things off let's hear from Congresswoman Eshoo. Congresswoman Eshoo, thank you for joining us.
