Technology and Policy: Shall The Twain Ever Meet?
by Rizwan Tufail and Janice Wait
These days, you can’t have a conversation that doesn’t feature how technology will tackle the world’s biggest challenges (yes — even your whiskey brand has opinions on that).
Today technology is in our living rooms, in our children’s toys, and embedded in our city streets. While this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, it raises the need for a more informed discussion — and stronger leadership — on technology policy to ensure the public benefit is safeguarded.
Some level of despair is warranted if you look at events of the past year — Facebook privacy scandals, Russian online disinformation campaigns, the ripping apart of data protection within Adhaar in India, or the repeal of net neutrality in the U.S. In fact, these problems are not new. In The Curse of Bigness, Tim Wu argues that the excessive corporate concentration that we see today could and should have been stopped by effective competition policy many years ago.
Sadly, this divide between technology and our policy-makers’ level of understanding of the issues seems only to be widening. You can be excused for cringing if you saw even part of Mark Zuckerberg’s testimony before the U.S. Congress. Technology is becoming more entwined in our lives, and concurrently, the gap between technologists and policy makers seems to be growing deeper.
There is an urgent need for more dialogue and policy leadership to ensure the internet can reclaim its place in the world as a force for public good.
Mozilla — and many others — recognize that advancing and nurturing policy leadership needs proactive investments. We need to build and support agency to drive these important technology policy conversations, and cultivate the experts who can tackle the issues head on.
That’s precisely why, in 2017, we started a fellowship program to focus specifically on technology policy.
The program invests in people with deep expertise in certain areas — in this case, at the intersection of government and internet policy — and provide them resources, tools, community and amplification to lead projects, start dialogues, and conduct research around important policy issues. Fellows dive into policy issues around internet health, grow their professional networks, sharpen their skills, and focus on how they would want the world to change because of their work.
Shaping policy can be — and is — a long game. Fellows will unlikely see direct policy impact during their yearlong fellowship tenure. However, by convening expert roundtables, helping policy-makers understand the subtleties involved in a particular domain, facilitating and participating in public discussions, and publishing analysis pieces, their impact is already being felt.
Marillia’s work as an ambassador for consumer and data protection in Brazil contributed significantly to the country’s Data Protection Bill and Digital Strategy Decree, and built bridges and capacity for consumer policymakers, tech civil society, and academia. She participated in public hearings in the National Congress, met regularly with policy makers, and helped drive a class action lawsuit against biometric data collection by banks in Brazil.
Caroline’s work focused on addressing the concentration of power in technology platforms by researching the impact of current antitrust laws, specifically looking at areas like acquisitions, vertical consolidations, and threats to innovation. She worked with officials in the U.S. government to evaluate anticompetitive effects of concentration and identify where these tools can be applied more effectively.
Mozilla Fellow Gigi Sohn, one of the nation’s leading public advocates for open, affordable, and democratic communications networks, helped users understand the implications of the net neutrality ruling. She provided strategic advice to public interest and philanthropic communities and built a large industry-public interest coalition on net neutrality that continues to work together.
Amba played a central role in the policy developments in India, providing thought leadership on issues of data protection and net neutrality. She published two instrumental pieces during her tenure, a report on how regulators globally have assessed “zero-rating” offers and whether they violate net-neutrality rules; and an Op-Ed in the India Express about the need for consent and accountability at the core of India’s new privacy law.
These individuals — as with all Mozilla fellows — share our vision of an internet that is a global public resource, open and accessible to all. We have long believed that moving closer to that vision requires in building and fueling a distributed movement of leaders. Reflecting on 2018, it is gratifying to think that the work of many of these leaders could still help turn our collective despair into hope. Sign up for our newsletter, to stay updated with the exciting journey ahead.
