Will the internet always be American? A Future Tense event.

Will the Internet Always Be American? A Future Tense Event.

Will the Internet Always Be American? A Future Tense Event.

Future Tense
The Citizen's Guide to the Future
Nov. 3 2016 12:26 PM

Will the Internet Always Be American? A Future Tense Event.

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Why are so many internet giants, like Google, American?

Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

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.

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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:

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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 SlateNew America, and Arizona State University.