Will the Internet Always Be American? A Future Tense Event.
Update, Nov. 10, 2016: This event has been rescheduled for Jan. 24, 2017.
Much to the annoyance of EU regulators and more authoritarian regimes elsewhere, hundreds of millions of people around the world rely on U.S. players—the likes of Twitter, Facebook, Alphabet, and Microsoft—to connect to information, and to one another.
Why is that? Is there something inherently American about the internet? And is America's online supremacy a business story, or one of cultural and legal values? Looking forward, this may be changing, as foreign governments seek to assert more control over the internet; individuals become less trusting of the U.S. government as a guardian of privacy and free speech; and American internet companies work to transcend their own nationality.
Join Future Tense at noon on Thursday, Nov. 10, in Washington, D.C., to explore the internet’s nationality, and the extent to which it’s an expression of American culture, and the extent to which that may be changing.
For more information and to RSVP, visit the New America website, where you can also watch the event live online.
Participants:
Ellery Roberts Biddle
Advocacy director, Global Voices
Fellow, Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society
Jennifer Daskal
Associate professor of law, American University
Joshua Keating
Staff writer, Slate
Moíses Naím
Distinguished fellow, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Author, The End of Power
Carolyn Nguyen
Director of technology policy, Microsoft
Emily Parker
Author, Now I Know Who My Comrades Are: Voices From the Internet Underground
Future Tense fellow, New America
Ross Schulman
Co-director, Cybersecurity Initiative at New America
Senior policy counsel, New America’s Open Technology Institute
Hao Wu
Fellow, New America
Documentary filmmaker
Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University.