Taylor Lorenz’s Power User - Congress Just Declared War on the Internet: The Patriot Act For Online Spaces Is Here

Episode Date: June 26, 2026

The Kids Act Could End Internet Freedom As We Know It. SUPPORT MY WORK: Buy a paid subscription to my newsletter at usermag.co        Support my work on Patreon: http://patreon.com/taylorlorenz   A massive new package of legislation, dubbed the "Kids Act," is moving through Congress with unprecedented speed. The package is a broad-based censorship and surveillance scheme that will affect every single American.In this episode of Free Speech Friday, I sit down with Adam Thierer, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), to break down the terrifying reality of what’s happening in Washington D.C. right now. Adam, who has been fighting for internet freedom since the 1990s, explains how these laws demand mass age verification (which applies to adults too), regulate design features like infinite scroll, and even target messaging apps and VPNs. We also dive into the 1,800 AI bills popping up across states, Bernie Sanders' misguided plans for AI, and why the government is moving to create an identity layer for the entire internet. We also discuss the toxic brew of "moral panic," fake anti-big tech sentiment, and censorship that is driving this legislation forward.Topics covered:What the Kids Act is and how it passed committeeMass age verification and the internet ID layerThe end of online anonymityWhy messaging apps and video games are targetsState laws controlling the national internetState AI preemption and Bernie Sanders' AI plansThe history of internet censorship from 1996 to today#AI #Tech #TechNews #InternetFreedom #KidsAct #Censorship #TechPolicy #OnlinePrivacy #AILaws #VPNBan #FreeSpeech #MassSurveillance #FirstAmendment #BigTech #BernieSanders #KOSA #DataPrivacy

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This is hard. And there's going to be massive unintended consequences if we go with these silver bullet solutions they're proposing today. This week, a group of some of the worst mass surveillance and censorship bills for the internet that we have ever seen moved forward in the house. This group of laws is named the Kids Act and it's being called the Patriot Act for the internet. The laws would absolutely eradicate online freedom, rollout mass age verification, have a slew of disastrous consequences. And it's all moving forward right now in the house with almost no pushback. is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. He's the author of two comprehensive books on tech policy,

and he's been working on internet regulations since the early 90s. Today, he's joining me to break down the Kids Act and explain exactly where things are right now when it comes to the state of online safety legislation in Congress. We're also going to talk about state AI preemptions, Bernie Sanders AI proposals, and basically all the laws that are brewing right now that could destroy the internet.

Adam, welcome. Thanks for being here. Thanks for having me, Taylor. So you're so deep in the weeds on all, you know, the latest developments with tech policy, especially related to these online safety laws. And this week, something called the Kids Act, move forward out of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Can you explain what is the Kids Act? It feels like this like abalgamation of all these different sort of so-called online safety laws, maybe some anti-deep fake laws. What's going on here? Well, you've got a right.

It's a hodgepodge of a lot of different online safety related measures. Some of them are well known. Some of them are new. but it's basically an effort by Congress to throw everything in a kitchen sink at the internet and try to regulate in a variety of ways. At the heart of it is a long-standing effort by different lawmakers to try to create some sort of identity layer age verification process for the entire internet, not just for kids, but for adults, of course, because you can't do one without the other.

And then there's a variety of other types of restrictions on what type of content might be allowed or what type of specific controls or mechanisms might be allowed on certain websites, how certain types of advertising work. It really even gets into the nitty-gritty of things like, you know, what kind of infinite scroll is allowed versus not. And what kind of like even video games are going to be now regulated again. So this is a quite ambitious effort by our Congress to try to impose some really onerous, heavy-handed types of speech controls

on the Internet. And unfortunately, this is the model, as you know, Taylor, because you've written about this, This is the model that's catching on across the globe in a lot of countries today. And it's just really sad to think that the United States is going to follow suit in this sort of more, what I regard as authoritarian approach to regulating Internet speech. What are the motivations behind these laws? Like, what is driving this wave of just, like, absolutely awful tech policy?

Well, it's nothing new that policymakers have had some sort of moral panic going on about the youth using the hot new technology of the day. I'm such a dinosaur that I started working on technology policy back in 1991, and I was there when Congress was trying to still regulate broadcast speech, and it still is trying to do that today. But now, right after that, we saw, of course, the effort to have the Communications Decency Act and the first initial regulation of online content in 1996 under the Telecom Act of 1996. And I was pushing back on that way back in the day. And then it evolved, and luckily, we had some really great court wins to stop the effort to try. try to censor the internet. And we had some other important court victories. But what motivated policymakers then is the same what motivates them now.

There's a broad-based concern about how youth are utilizing these new technologies. And then, of course, you can add to that moral panic aspect a new motivation, which is that a lot of lawmakers are increasingly agitated by big tech. Now what they mean by big tech varies, but you hear this universal excuse now, like we need to hold big tech accountable. It just falls out of their mouths endlessly without it really being clear what that means. And it seems that they don't understand

it means regulating the entire internet, not just large technology companies. But that motivation is what I think has really put Congress in a position now to potentially actually do something that would be this comprehensive and heavy-handed because there's just such deep distrust in technology companies.

And then you marry that up with the moral panic mentality and you've got a really, dangerous toxic brew of sensorial regulation coming. What could some of the unintended consequences of this law be? Yeah, well, you're right to point to the potential unintended consequences of these laws because that's exactly what's going to happen. A lot of what I've spent my life studying is the unintended consequences of well-intentioned

regulation. Obviously, there's a sincere desire by many people that try to take steps to protect children, but they don't always think through the consequences of what that will mean in practice. And so in this context, when you talk about rules that say we're going to age verify everybody before they go online, or we're going to have broad-based so-called duty of care type of provisions governing certain types of content, or we're going to limit certain types of design elements of certain types of social media sites, you're talking about affecting the day-to-day experience of millions of Americans, including many adults in terms of how they interact with information, each other, and the Internet broadly. And that raises some real questions about whether or not our government, will be in a position to potentially just vacuum up information about people when they're age verifying everyone. You know, how is it going to be done? In some cases, it might be done through facial scans. Are those facial scans retained? What else might they be utilized for? You know, when you have a vast amount of information being collected by government actors, it can be used

in a variety of ways that weren't originally anticipated. Now, the proponents of these measures say, we've got new ways of doing this. That's all going to be safe. Well, we've heard that story before. And we've seen one privacy breach or security breach after another with large data sets, both for governments and corporations. And so you can't with one hand be saying as a government official, we want more strong privacy and security and data minimization and to limit all this collection of data. But, oh, by the way, we want to age verify or identify everybody before they go online. These things are intention. They're in fact in direct conflict. And so a choice has to be made.

Like what kind of a position or approach are we going to take with regards to protecting children in the more rational and sort of streamlined and kind of. constitutional and less privacy invasive way than we're doing now. But I think unfortunately, most of them don't want to hear that. They're ready to go. The biggest problem, Taylor, I've seen in all my years of covering online safety debates, is this elusive search for a silver bullet solution. Like, what's the simple fix here? When I go talk to lawmakers and their staff, it's what I hear every single time.

What do you think we should do about this? I'm like, well, it's not easy. Let's lay out some options, but like, they just want to know that the simplest fix. Well, there's not a simple fix. This is hard. And there's going to be massive unintended consequences if we go with these silver bullet solutions they're proposing today. Yeah, I feel like a lot of people, especially if they're watching my channel, they're probably familiar with a lot of the unintended consequences of age verification or maybe COSA rather because I've talked about it a lot. But kind of like you mentioned at the top, the Kids Act is this like mishmash of a lot of different things.

And it's actually, I would say broader than COSA. You have the Spy Kids Act, the Safer Gaming Act, the safe messaging for Kids Act. That sounds like it kind of targets messaging apps. All of these are the promoting a safe internet for minors act. Like what is this? It sounds like it's bigger than just social media potentially. It is. This is why I talked about sort of everything plus the kitchen sink approach.

I mean, lawmakers are really just trying to throw stuff against the wall to see what sticks at this point. And they've, of course, been met in court many times over and found that their previous enactments have been unconstitutional. So I think at some point they're just hoping and praying that something does stick and pass constitutional muster. The reality is that there's not a consistent sort of approach to this. It's just all of these different bills being cobbled together. And in some cases, they're a little bit in conflict or the lawmakers have been arguing about one being much better than the other. The bottom line from where I'm sitting is that almost all of these raise some serious constitutional questions. They potentially violate free speech rights.

They are potentially privacy or security invasive. And, you know, I just always believe that there's better ways to approach concerns about online safety issues. I was a part of five different online safety task forces in the 2000s and early 2010s. And, you know, again and again and again, we came back to alternative approaches that were focused on empowerment and education and sort of literacy. And a lot of policymakers say, well, that's fine and well, but we need to go well beyond that. We need to have these sort of technocratic against silver bullet solutions. And I'm saying, I'm sorry, Senator, but I just don't think these things are going to work or they're going to have such, you know, really troubling consequences for speech more broadly or the Internet. and internet freedom more broadly that we don't want to go down that road, but they're not listening

anymore. Yeah, they're not listening and they're getting, I think, even more emboldened. Like, I'm really scared. I mentioned that, like, New Mexico case, the social media addiction case against meta included WhatsApp. And we're seeing Marsha Blackburn and a lot of other people in Congress increasingly mentioned messaging apps as the problem. Snapchat itself is a messaging app. Adam Masari said the primary way young people use social media, or at least Instagram, is actually direct messaging. So some people might be listening, oh, I don't really use social media or social media regulated, but their definition of social media can be kind of anything that connects people, right? That's exactly right. I think they're thinking very ambitiously now about taking on all sorts

of different information sharing and communications platforms. And this is extraordinarily troubling. It's gotten so bad, Taylor, that as you know, and I think you've actually written about this, they're actually now thinking about going after VPN's virtual private networks. You know, we've always pointed out when we've talked about the problems of trying to, regulator sensor content or speech or platforms that people will always operate sort of evasively. They will try to find a way to evade these rules. And it's not just kids, it's adults too. And so VPNs are a mechanism to do that. There are a great sort of technology of freedom internationally helping people to evade authoritarian controls in other types of countries where

governments really crack down. VPNs are a way for them to route around that. Well, they can be utilized here in America too. But now incredibly, we're seeing some governments across the globe and even some of our domestic policymakers suggest that we should regulate VPNs. And so that gets really truly Orwellian. And I'm not one to throw away the term Orwellian much, but like this is really dangerous when our government's essentially regulating technologies of freedom

and saying, thou shall not take any steps to try to gather information or evade our controls. I mean, that's deeply, deeply troubling, not just from a First Amendment perspective, but from a basic human freedom perspective that I can't use these technologies to go out and seek information as I wish.

So if we go down that path, we're in serious trouble as a nation. This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales, using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows

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You know, like you're mentioning, it seems like the motivation for all this. stuff is ultimately information control. And I wrote a piece in The Guardian last week about, you know, what's going on in the UK. And you saw Kirstarmer RIP talking about how basically, I think there was some proposal where he wants like BBC content to be like, you know, upvoted in the algorithm or whatever. And even though they're constantly talking about child safety, when I've listened to these trials and listened to these arguments, it seems like they really want control over our news and information ecosystem. So how much do you think of this is really driven by the desire to protect kids? And how much is just about controlling our access to information? Because the

internet really democratized that for a while. And I feel like allowed all of us to gain a huge amount of access to information and hear all these different viewpoints. Seems like the government wants to roll that back. I love that point, Taylor. And I totally agree with it. I think obviously there's always been an impulse by government and government actors to try to control information. and you hear a lot of these debates about what constitutes misinformation or disinformation today. But these are longstanding debates that go way back. But the good news is today, and you pointed it out, is that we have more thoroughly democratized technology and communications and media platforms.

You know, I think about my childhood again. I'm a dinosaur. I'm an old man. So I grew up in the 70s. And back then, I grew up in the middle of the Midwest where we had very limited media access, did not have a library in my town. My bookstore was a pharmacy. And we only had really two and a half broadcast.

stations that we could get at. I say two and a half because two came in and the third one didn't come in so well in the cornfields. I was living in a state of what you might consider information poverty. We had just scarce limited choices. And even back then, government was trying to control, control, control. But the good news is the First Amendment made it very difficult for them to control traditional types of print, media, books, newspapers, magazines. But unfortunately, we got stuck in this rut where we had broadcast radio and television more controlled and even licensed by our government. And that's where these debates about, information control and misinformation came into play.

And then the internet came along, and we had an important choice. We had this amazing moment where a technology, as I like to say, was born free, as opposed to being born into captivity. And we allowed that democratization to happen and for people to go seek truth and information in their own ways.

This was wonderful for society. The internet gets a bad rap today, but we live in a world now of information abundance instead of information poverty. And yeah, there's certainly a lot of crap out there. That goes with all the volume. But we have all of that wonder of information and some people, some elites and some policymakers want to say, well, we don't like all that stuff. We don't like it when it talks about us or when it tries to say things that we don't like.

And so now there's this impulse to control what they regard as misinformation, disinformation, or wholesome information, whatever you want to call it. And that is incredibly troubling because when you marry that up with the child safety concerns and then the concerns about large technology companies, you've got a trifective trouble, right? a real toxic brew of regulatory impulses that could lead us down the road we're facing right now in Congress this very week. So what is the status of what's going on? And obviously this could even change by the time this episode comes out. But where are things with the kids act? How likely is this stuff going to be passed through? I feel like another thing that I constantly hear from my followers is like, is it a five alarm fired now?

Should I call my congressperson now? How worried should I be? How close is this stuff to moving forward? I would argue just keep calling, call your congressperson every day and tell them what you think. But yeah, where do things stand in terms of this child safety legislation push in Congress right now? Well, it's not in a good place. The reality is that the conflict we're seeing between lawmakers and the White House and other policymakers is basically like who's going to race to a more repressive sort of set of rules. The debate we're seeing right now between, for example, the House and the Senate over the so-called COSA the Kids Online Safety Act is a question of like exactly how heavy-handed are they going to make the so-called duty of care provisions, which would be these completely.

open-ended amorphous sort of mandates to basically make your system safe and you have a duty of care to like prevent certain types of harms. It's just an open invitation to have all of these platforms sued and regulated in various ways. But like there's a debate going on behind the scenes between the Senate and the House about those provisions. But at the end of the day, they're just debating about the finer points about how to repress information, you know, a little bit more or a lot, right? And the idea that we're talking about and the sort of like freedom of speech and expression and broad-based freedoms that we cherish, there's no champions. I mean, I look around in Congress, Taney, I'm like, where are the people who are standing up for the First Amendment and the concerns here? The most you hear is someone pointing out some of the security potential lapses or privacy stuff. Every once in a while, you'll hear that in a hearing room.

But nobody dares speak the term First Amendment in a hearing room. It's just like it's become almost like a radioactive term. This is the very first amendment of our Constitution. It's like this should get some champions, but they're just not there. Yeah, I saw some tweet from Blumenthal. I think he posted it today or yesterday of like complaining basically that things don't go far enough. As you said, they're all in this like race to the bottom. And I, you know, I thought of this even with these terrible groups, the tech oversight project design it for us.

These these activist groups that go out and pressure the government to censor the Internet. They're all against this COSA because it's not even like censorious enough. And that's so terrifying. I mean, like you said, it's like no one is speaking up. I heard from an activist a while ago who works for a human rights organization who said, you know, the free speech issue is kind of lost. You can't really say those words and expect Gen Z to care. And that is really scary to me because as you said, this is our most fundamental rights. It's really scary.

And, you know, ironically, Taylor, it could be that to the extent this doesn't happen in Congress this year. It's because the extremists on the, you know, pro-repression, pro-regulatory side are fighting amongst themselves about how to go further and further and further and further. There's even some people in the free speech community that sit around and wonder like, gee, should we let the nut cases go as far as they want so it'll be easier to strike all this down in court later? And I'm like, whoa, be careful with that kind of a gambit. You don't want to do that. But that's actually what happened in the mid-90s when we were working on the Telecom Act and the Communications Decency Act got bundled in. It actually was a very broad sort of sensorial approach to regulating indecency and obscenity online. And basically it went to court and was immediately enjoyed, immediately, you know, and then struck down in a historic case.

But that's a gambit you don't want to go down. I'm not going to suddenly say, yeah, sure, go ahead and do your crazy stuff, Congress, and we'll just see you in court. I mean, we're probably going to see them in court anyway, but I'd rather us not get there. Yeah, I mean, that's what I heard. Was it all 2023 or 24? The years are all blending together. But I was cut you know, I've been covering these age verification laws at the time it was for the Washington Post and all these people were like, oh, no, yeah, it's just going to go extreme. A lot of people in the adult entertainment industry. And then we saw the Paxton ruling. And the Supreme Court basically was like, yeah, actually you can do age verification, something that I guess a lot of these people thought would never happen. And so, yeah, it doesn't seem like it's great to wait for the court decide. And that's if it gets to the Supreme Court, a lot of this stuff is just going to sort of peter out and I don't know, whatever courts go below that, you know, I don't think we should rely on that. I don't trust them. basically. Yeah, but it's not clear what else we would do because obviously logic isn't prevailing in

the halls of Congress these days or for that matter state legislatures. You know, a major thing that's changed over recent years, Taylor, is that back in the old days in the 90s and 2000s, we did not have hundreds upon hundreds of state laws passing that basically took this patchwork approach to regulating speech. This is something very new and different. And so now, even if the federal effort doesn't go forward, you're still stuck with this sporadic patchwork. of speech policies that are incredibly repressive and hard to know even how to comply with. You know, part of my response to a lot of the assertions made by lawmakers, federal state level about this is that like not only are your techno silver bullet solutions not going to solve

these complex social problems, but they're certainly not going to solve those problems if you've got 50 conflicting standards on what to do. I mean, it's not just that the companies won't know what to do, parents won't know what to do. It's, they're not going to be a clear playbook. So it's like, I don't think that's a very good approach. You know, just because we win at the federal level, which I don't know if we're going to, we're going to get stuck with all of that conflicting law at the state level. Yeah, and you have these, like, I would call them activist states like Utah, which I guess, you know, California has done this too, where they just, they set these really extreme laws. And then, of course, because the platform is a universal platform, there's no Texas version or California

version of Facebook, meta just defaults to the most repressive state regime. And so that's horrible. And I think it's really scary. As you mentioned, it's something that I guess we didn't see in the 90s. I wasn't up on the tech regulation landscape back then. But, you know, it kind of makes me think of a lot of the conversations that are happening around AI and the state AI preemption. Marshall Blackburn actually was attempting to package the sort of do this deal where like she would agree with the state AI preemption, I guess, if Trump agreed to push COSA. Where are things standing with AI? Because I feel like this is the next frontier of access to information.

And they're already from the jump seeking to, you know, put a lot of. restrictions in place. Yeah, you've got it exactly right, Taylor, because what's happening in the AI debate is that you're seeing the child safety rationales bleed into concerns about AI access and AI frontier models and others, and chatbots in particular. So you're seeing essentially emerging of these sorts of efforts, these bills, and these approaches. And right now, incredibly, in the United States, we have 1,800 AI bills. One thousand 800. You know, That's an incredible number. In my entire lifetime, I've never seen anything like that, not just in the world of tech policy,

but in the world of policy, period. That's unprecedented for any issue, any technology, any sector. So policymakers are completely out of control, just sort of throwing stuff at the wall. And a lot of it's rooted in the idea that this is about protecting children or protecting safety broadly. And so now these things are on a collision course, and what we're seeing at the White House is a concern about how that potentially undermines America's broader goals about developing AI and fighting China and everything else. And so what this deal is behind the scenes you've been hearing about

is an effort to say, well, what if we package a little bit of preemption of the state laws alongside of all of these child safety bills, regardless of them being unconstitutional? And then we call that the grand compromise, like AI preemption for kids safety. Well, the problem is that, number one, the preemption they're talking about is extraordinarily limited. It's not really like all of these different Patrick's state laws. It's like a very small subset that really regular. sort of like how large frontier models made by Anthropic or Open AI or regulated for different reasons. It doesn't do anything about the child safety stuff or like pricing rules or like any of the other laws that are that are passing.

And number two, the preemption we're talking about is what's called floor preemption and not sealing preemption. Floor preemption would be like the Congress sets a new law at the federal level, but then says states you can go ahead and do whatever you want on top of it. That's not really preemption, but that's what they're debating. if we had sealing preemption that limited what states could do, that would be a different kind of deal. So this deal they're talking about with the White House is crazy. It's absolutely insane. It's like, here's a bunch of unconstitutional South safety laws and here's a little small amount of preempt. That's not a deal worth making. So, you know, I don't think it's going to work anyway because honestly, there's people on the other side that even hear the term preemption. Like, forget about it.

We're out. So at the end of the day, everybody may just cancel each other, everybody else at the federal level. Yeah, all these extremists are going to like, hopefully, eat each other alive. You know, we'll see. You know, you also have Bernie Sanders weighing in. Bernie Sanders has pushed, unfortunately, this moral panic about social media. He's boosted a lot of, I would say, really harmful rhetoric about, you know, social media, speech restrictions, et cetera. And now he's taking on AI. And I know you've been sort of covering his, his latest sort of regulatory scheme for AI. What is he trying to do in the AI realm right now? Yeah, he's got a couple of different ideas, and they're actually quite contradictory. One thing is he's proposed along with AOC,

is a federal moratorium on data centers. So there's been consideration by many states to limit the buildout of data centers for various reasons. We won't get into all of it. But then Sanders and AOC have a federal bill that would ban data centers for a time at the federal level.

That would be pretty significant because data centers are, of course, what we rely on, not just for AI, but for storing things in the cloud and all of our social media and everything else, all of our YouTube video, everything, right? I mean, it's crazy. It's essentially a war on computation right at the source.

We're saying you can't even build the places that compute computation happens or things are stored. So he has that on one hand, a bill like that. Then he has a new bill that he's introduced called a sovereign wealth AI fund where he says like, well, everybody deserves a cut of AI riches. And when these large tech companies get rich, everybody should get something back. And so he's created this essentially a quasi almost nationalization scheme to say, we're going to put a 50% tax on all AI companies and raise $7 trillion dollars. start paying out to people.

Now, these things, remember the bill I just told you about, let's regulate all the data centers, if not ban them, and then a bill that says we're going to raise $7 trillion by a through a 50% tax on all AI system. That doesn't work. If you're trying to tax something, an industry that, by the way, isn't even currently profitable. Open AI and Anthropics still haven't turned any profit.

I mean, there's nothing, there's no wealth to share. So it's just, you know, how's that going to work? But then if you're basically saying they're not allowed to build out their computation systems and their servers and everything, then there's definitely not going to be any wealth to share. So it's very strange what Sanders is up to, but I think it just reflects the fact that he doesn't like AI. He's concerned.

He's uneasy with it like a lot of policymakers. And that moral panic mentality, techno panic, has led him to just throw all of these crazy ideas out there and then some. And that's the world we live in right now in 2026 tech policy land. Yeah, I feel like it's disappointing because, you know, when you refuse to acknowledge that there are benefits to AI, I'm sorry, people are going to. be so mad at me in the comments, but there are good uses of AI, okay? Like, it's not all that, not, you know, a lot of this technology is not universally bad. It's not to excuse some of the

Ms. You know, Elon Musk's terrible data center or whatever, whatever. But when we don't acknowledge the benefits, we can't ensure that the benefits are equally shared. We can't have thoughtful conversations about regulation. And like you said, you're coming up with these really blunt policies that I don't think are ultimately going to achieve anything that we want, right? Like if you want to tackle, you know, the fact that Americans are struggling financially, like, there are probably a lot of economic policies that can do that. I don't know that this like weird AI scheme is going to result in any of that. As you mentioned, these companies are not even profitable.

Open AI, like, God knows what's going to happen to them. They've raised so much money. They're not growing as fast as anthropropic. Like, it just, it seems like a mess. It is a huge mess. And, you know, at some point, as a nation, you have to ask ourselves, like, do we, are we going to allow for any further technological development in the digital sphere? because at some point this has broader base ramifications.

You know, we're racing against China for leadership in this field, and we don't want their systems to become the global norm because that would be packed with all sorts of authoritarian, you know, repressive and sensorial control nonsense. We want American systems to prosper, both because it's good for the globe, but also because it's good for us. We create more innovation. We create more growth, more jobs.

These things are real. And a lot of people are skeptical of AI. I get it. But the reality is that it's already operationalized in so many people's lives in their phones and their computers, the systems, their recommendation systems. When you go to a doctor, you probably don't even realize how much AI is happening behind the scene

to help doctors with diagnostics and all sorts of other things. So there's all sorts of potential benefits there. I understand a lot of the skepticism, but I always believe, Taylor, there's almost always a better way to address those concerns than ideas like outright bans or censorship or privacy invasive like surveillance mechanisms or age verification.

These are heavy-handed approaches. Let's take a less restrictive approach that targets problems and comes up with more concrete and workable solutions. There was a time when Republicans and Democrats could work together in the 90s on like these issues. And the Clinton Gore administration did wonderful things on internet policy and agreed with the Republican Congress for like a framework for the internet that allowed it to flourish and blossom. And now, you know, we've got all these services at our fingertips. That happened because we got policy right with sort of sensible approaches and not these heavy-handed hammers. that like people are trying to come in with now and just destroy everything. Yeah, I think there's just this idea that like the internet was a mistake or bad or whatever,

instead of this thing that led to, as you said, like, this enormous wealth of knowledge and innovation and convenience and companies and economic growth. And like it's just, in my opinion, it's like it's just undeniably, I think we did the right thing in the 90s in terms of the tech policy that we were making. And I know that there's this tech clash now. but as we're on the brink of this new sort of system of information and new tech, like when you ask these people what AI is, they don't even really know. Like they don't understand the disintegrated. They sort of just understand like chat GPT. And it's like, okay, well, you can hate that product.

But then you hate the concept of technology. It reminds you of these same people trying to ban like open source software or like just ban things at the operating system levels. Like, do you know what an operating system is? Like, I don't think a lot of these lawmakers do. I definitely don't think they do. They're very unfamiliar with how most of this technology. works. They've unfortunately probably watched a few too many sci-fi movies and shows about AI and robotics.

And they've just, their brains are just dripping with dystopian dread about like the future now. And it's very scary because they could end up derailing this technology revolution, taking away choices from us. You know, Taylor, what you just said was so important about like the empowering and the democratizing nature of modern information revolution. Just, you know, I very, very short, quick story. I recently had a third round of eye surgeries. I've had crazy eye problems throughout my life. And this is the first eye surgery I've had over the last 15 years where I had various types of AI LLMs at my disposal to like doing research. And I'm always careful about this because I know you've got to watch what's on the internet. But very quickly I typed in some of my symptoms to chat GPT and said,

here's some things I'm experiencing. And I won't go into all the details, but the long and the short of it is that basically it sped out a series of things that sounded like what my problem was. I went to a doctor 24 hours later. It had perfectly diagnosed what I had. identified that problem with a great deal of accuracy, gave me the ability to speak with my specialist in a far more intelligent and calm fashion than I used to say, like, what's happening to me?

I don't understand on this. I understood before I walked into that room what was likely wrong with my eyes and had a more intelligent conversation with my doctors and my specialists. Millions upon millions of Americans now have that ability at their fingertips. And then it's not just Chachabit,

but I go to all these wonderful sights were in by the Cleveland Clinic and the Mayo Clinic and all of these other things, WebMD, and I'm just packed with information now that I didn't have when I was a youth. The only information source I had at my youth like that was a set of, a 22-volume set of encyclopedias, and they went outdate really, really quickly. The World Book Encyclopedias of 1978 were wonderful until they weren't, until they couldn't answer any questions for me. And now I can get answers.

I am one of Motenui. On July 10th. Maui, you will board my boat and restore the heart of Tefiti. And here we go. The journey begins. See her light up the night in the sea. She calls me. The ocean chose you.

Let's go save the world. I got your back, chosen one. Disney's Moana. Boat's Nick. His name is Hay Hey. His name is Yum. When he goes in my tum-tum. In theater's July 10th.

Yeah, and get answers. Like immediately, I had a similar situation. with like a health thing that the let I was able to use AI to like diagnose this thing that my doctor didn't wasn't on their radar I end up seeing a specialist got the diagnosis like got treatment for something that I that was affecting my life like so that kind of is what like I don't know like red blue whatever pilled clear pilled me like on AI and I'm not like I'm such a skeptic I hate like the way that it's used in so many ways and I think there's so many criticisms to have of it just the way I have a lot of criticisms about the internet but like I worry about throwing

the baby out with the bathwater and I worry about the way that this discourse cycle is going because we're ending up with some really scary laws. Yeah, and you think about it from the perspective of going back full circle to these child safety laws, these age verification mandates, all of a sudden our personal, you know, information searches and the information we're gathering might be subjected to like these identity verification schemes or government data collection and access. I don't want the government to have their hands on that information when I'm searching for personal health matters.

And the reality is that they'll always say, well, that's not what it's about. It's about other things. Yeah, but that's not the. way it works. Once you open the door to this sort of mischief, all sorts of other problems potentially follow. So we don't want to go down that path. We want to take a better, more thoughtful approach that finds focused solutions, really rooted in education, empowerment types of things. And yes, selective enforcement of certain laws at the margins when they make sense. We can find laws that are already in the books that probably solve a lot of the problems we're talking about.

But let's not have these really truly almost authoritarian top-down solutions be the way we're completely reorder the internet and information systems and AI. That's not good for America. It's total authoritarianism. It's scary and especially scary that all these liberals are on board when Trump is in office. I'm like, you guys are the ones talking all day about authoritarianism. Like, what is going on? Well, Adam, I'm just so grateful for your time. Thank you so much for joining me today and all the work that you do. I really hope people can sort of follow your commentary on acts. You do a great job breaking all this stuff down. And yeah, thanks for chatting. Thanks so much, Taylor. I enjoyed it. All right. That's it for this week's Free Speech Friday.

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