The Future of Communications: Reed Hundt on Current Issues and Tough Choices
The 3rd Class Colloquium in our series was a huge success as Reed Hundt took us on a Greyline Tour of the issues being debated right now in Congress and how revolutions in communications and computing amplify both the possibilities and the threats coming soon.
Here is the recording of Reed’s presentation and the Q&A. It’s well worth listening to.
After revealing “the seven tech stocks I own” — partly for fun and partly as “full disclosure” — Reed organized his remarks around two main areas:
1. Big Tech. In the upcoming Congressional hearing, the CEOs of the 4 Big Tech companies (Facebook, Apple, Amazon and Google) will appear before Congress, facing Antitrust questions. This will be the “most spectacular Congressional hearing on technology this Century,” the last one being when Microsoft appeared in 1998.
2. Biden. Reed mentioned his views about what policy agenda might be pursued by a Biden Administration, should he win the election, and that’s been published independently as an Op-Ed on Yale1969.org.
The bulk of time was spent on the first question, focussing on the following subpoints:
- Antitrust
- Political Microtargeting
- Misinformation
- Content Moderation (Hate Speech)
- China
- Privacy
With respect to the policy agenda for the Biden Administration, Reed briefed us on how “distributed computing” — a combination of blindingly fast communications (via 5G technology) and increasingly decentralized computing — might allow a President Biden to not only deal with the health and economic devastation of COVID, but address the other, major issues that need attention. See his Op-Ed after to listen to this recording for more.