State of the Net 2018

Recent reports on Artificial Intelligence from the World Economic Forum and the AI Now Institute have reiterated a need for policymaker engagement and thoughtful examination of the impact of AI on society. As algorithmic decision making continues to grow more central to our lives, pervading fields such as policing, hiring, and entertainment, it has brought us into previously uncharted policy territory. These algorithms, however, are treated as "black boxes", where decisions are made through mathematical heuristics rather than linear logic. With the discovery of biases inherent to the machine learning process, how can companies, consumers, and government ensure that these technologies are used for good? Join us as we discuss the impact of these algorithms, the push for algorithmic fairness, and the attempt to build transparent algorithms that can explain their reasoning.

It will have been one year into the Trump Administration and it is time to take stock of the complex set of International arrangements that the Administration is dealing with. A new set of stages for these issues are fast approaching. World governments and international groups are jockeying for greater control over Internet functions and content. Confabs like the ITU 2018 Plenipotentiary Conference (PP-18) are just one of the many venues that will reveal the struggles for Internet domination. Complex trade deals and national regulations such as the NAFTA and the imminent European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will strain intergovernmental cooperation. Cyber security initiatives and law enforcement cross-border access to citizen data will test the sovereignty of nations. 2018 may be the most significant year in terms of Internet governance since the dawn of the Internet.

Every day we’re learning more about nation-state attempts to tamper with democratic elections in the U.S., in Germany, in Africa and across the globe. Trust is the bedrock of any well-functioning democracy. Yet revelations over the last several months show that nation-states are using the Internet to undermine that trust. Our panel will look at what we know about how the Internet is being used to disrupt democratic elections and what can be done about it.

U.S. Rep. Greg Walden represents the people of Oregon's Second Congressional District, which includes 20 counties in central, southern, and eastern Oregon. Walden, 60, is a lifelong Oregonian whose ancestors came to Oregon by wagon train in 1845. 
He and his wife Mylene celebrated 35 years of marriage in August 2017, and make their home in Hood River where they’ve been small business owners since 1986.  Their son, Anthony graduated from Hood River Valley High School and Wake Forest University.  His parents are graduates of the University of Oregon.
Walden and his wife spent more than two decades as radio station owners in the Gorge.  He’s also a licensed amateur radio operator (W7EQI).  He put that small business and technology experience to work as chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Communications and Technology.  In this role, he worked to pass legislation to grow American jobs by expanding access to wireless broadband, spur new U.S. technology and innovation, and protect the Internet from government control.
His work in support of Oregon’s rural farm and ranch economy has earned him local and national recognition.  He’s helped write and pass bipartisan legislation to expedite treatment of fire-prone forests, and continues to work across the aisle to find natural resource solutions. The House has also passed bipartisan legislation Walden has championed to fix broken federal forest policy to restore forest health and put people back to work in the woods, as well as legislation (now law) to bring more water and power to Central Oregon for job creation. 
Walden’s experience as a former member of the Hood River Memorial Hospital Board of Trustees and as a former member of the Oregon Health Sciences University Foundation Board have helped in his work to improve access to affordable health care, especially in rural communities.  His successful efforts have earned him national and local awards. 
Walden has also worked hard to ensure that Oregon service members and veterans receive the benefits they have earned through years of brave service. 
In November 2014, Walden’s House Republican colleagues unanimously reelected him to serve as chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC).
In December 2016, Walden was selected as Chairman of the full Committee on Energy & Commerce.

More and more Internet policy is finding its way into international trade deals. This development reflects the realization by governments, companies, and activists that rules governing digital data now exert a larger impact on GDP growth than the centuries-old trade in goods. The Trump Administration is in negotiations on several fronts to revise existing trade deals including NAFTA. Items new to the negotiating table include algorithm integrity, micro-advertising, and intermediary liability protections. Other familiar trade issues include privacy and intellectual property rules. Join our panel of experts while they ponder the the creation of Internet policy by international trade.

The policy framework guiding communications policy has never been more fragmented and uncertain. The Federal Communications Commission is expected to undo its "Open Internet" reclassification of Internet services under Title II. Last spring President Trump signed legislation from Capitol Hill which effectively repealed the FCC's recent Internet privacy rules. At the same time many states are looking to pass their own Internet rules -- particularly on privacy. The Federal Trade Commission has been making moves to exert more jurisdiction over open Internet principles and communications privacy but it's authority is in question pending review by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. All the while, both Houses of Congress are weighing their options and searching for political will to rewrite rules of the road for Internet services. We'll discuss these issues and more at State of the Net.

During a recent Homeland Security Committee hearing Chairman Ron Johnson asked FBI Director Christopher Wray to describe a sort wizards' brew” of cyber security threats. Wray painted a picture of "a blurring between different kinds of threats," from nation state actors working with hackers-for-hire enlisting troll farms and autonomous bots. That’s all on top of increases in traditional economic cyber schemes from ransomware to Equifax, and everything in between. The motivations for the myriad high profile hacks recently are mostly varied and in some cases unknown. Worse, the tools and capabilities used in these attacks are vastly more sophisticated, some of which are NSA tools released into the wild. And soon some techniques may take the form of artificial intelligence attacks. The problem has become so complex and urgent that Microsoft President Brad Smith has called for a “Digital Geneva Convention” to start grapple with these issues. Our expert panel will explore dig deep into the Wizards' Brew to better illuminate the new threat matrices and what’s being done to counter them.

The massive Equifax breach in September 2017 reminded us yet again that traditional authentication credentials such as social security numbers should have been left back in the last century. The Internet has made data ubiquitous and transactions instantaneous, and our antediluvian authentication methods fail time and again to protect data, assets and transactions. Yet, blockchain technology has quietly been growing as a versatile ledger for all sorts of authenticated transactions beyond currency. Realtors are using blockchain to streamline real estate listings. Human resource companies are exploring blockchain technology to provide efficient access to employee benefits. Internet platforms are exploring blockchain to reduce advertising fraud and to keep out fake news bots and trolls. The applications are endless. Our panel will explore whether blockchain may be the answer to our public policy prayers in a post Equifax world.

In December 2016 a North Carolina man, Edgar Welch, drove 350 miles from his home to a neighborhood pizza place in Washington, DC with his AR-15 assault rifle to “self-investigate” a bogus election-related Internet story involving the democratic presidential candidate. Traditional media had discredited the fake news story countless times. Welch was arrested after firing shots in the pizza place. Mercifully, no one was injured.  Internet policy veterans have seen a lot develop in the space in the last 25 years. They’ve been shocked, disgusted, and often perplexed by the information circulated online. Yet many have taken solace in the belief that the antidote to bad or bogus speech is even more speech by more trusted speakers. We believed that more speech would inexorably lead to a hegemony of trusted, credible, and truthful content on the Internet.  We’ve heard from many Internet policy veterans that the pizza shooting catalyzed some soul searching about what the Internet had become and whether even more speech would level the equation. Since then we’ve learned more and more about the information that was flowing virally around the Internet during the election. What sources of information and which speakers can be trusted? We have had to create a new lexicon to understand the state of speech on the Net: Fake news, troll-farms, disinformation, nation-state sponsored advertising, post-fact society, data injection attacks, narrative-laundering, networked propaganda, to name a few.
Now the rush to find solutions has begun, and it’s not yet clear whether solutions will be easy to come by. Pizza place shooter Edgar Welch was stark illustration that fake news can manifest itself directly as mortal danger in the nation’s capital. But the fact that Welch went to “self-investigate” veracity of the false story is even more disturbing. He didn’t fully trust the erroneous conspiracy story, evidenced by his later admission that the “Intel wasn’t 100%.” Yet, he also did not trust traditional media stories debunking the story.
We’ve reached a crisis of trust in our society’s sources of information just as the lines between traditional media and Internet media have all but vanished. Recent congressional hearings have revealed that determined actors can further erode trust in information and institutions.
At the same time, more powerful platforms designed to help us sort through information may have inadvertently empowered us to view only information that we prefer or that reinforces our own biases. A sort of societal tribalism is emerging, leading to increased polarization.
Solutions to these problems are far more complex than most are willing to believe. As prominent researcher danah boyd rightly pointed out in a blog piece, “[Edgar Welch] was doing was something that we’ve taught people to do — question the information they’re receiving and find out the truth for themselves.”
Our panel will explore these questions and what we can do about it.

We are on the cusp of a generational shift --- in wireless networks. New generations takeover from the old ones -- because they have to. The next generation of wireless Internet -- dubbed 5G -- is coming fast because radically new technology is required to connect us faster and better. From augmented reality to autonomous cars, we are facing a new era of connectivity. Also, 5G is needed to connect the so-called Internet of Things and, basically, the Internet of Everything. Chances are your recent holiday shopping spree will help catapult us to where each American home will have 50 connected devices (an estimate by Gartner for the year 2020). But the future will require some creative engineering, bold policy decisions, and all of us working in the same direction. Our panel will look at the near future of 5G wireless -- if we make it happen.