We are not going to move a car office lot today. Exactly. But it is something you might be willing to consider. It brings us full circle to the beginning of the panel with joel pointing out we might get rid of stuff under the aup but we are not messing with the feed. One might wonder, could that amount to a commitment of some kind in the future or not . Obviously, we are not going to move a car office lot today. Those might be interesting to think about to bridge the gap alex is invoking. Even though yelp and other companies would not do it, they would argue in court for the right to do it because they have First Amendment rights. That is the way they are interpreting them. That is going to be a real issue. Why not establish a reputational stake in something . I dont know if google regrets it, dont be evil. That is a way of saying come at us if we let you down. Google has ways of looking at this issue. The right to do what you want to with the data you collect is an interesting question the courts will have to deal with. Alex, thank you for that intervention. Wonderful. Adam, let me turn to you. Adam connor applegate, a new startup. We want to change the world and save government trade with the eyes of the world upon you. Thank you. We have the spirit of the startup are presented here. Catherine, nancy . Pass. Nicco . I reserve the balance of my time for the subsequent session. Join me in thanking the panel. [applause] we stand adjourned until 11 00. More from the internet policy discussion on internet startups. This is an hour and a half. Welcome back. Welcome to the folks who have joined us. My name is nicole mille n icco mele. I am teaching my first class of the semester as soon as we wrap this up at 1 00. I thought the title of this part of the program is called your next big start up idea, why your net policy matters. The goal is to get into a discussion about what it means for newer companies and startups, what internet policy, ways it can constrain and encourage newer companies entering the space. Before we do that, at the end of the last session, we had a compelling comment from alex jones. Alex mentioned two things. One was the San FranciscoCourt Judgment on during the yelp case. There was another story wanted to mention. They are related. The other one was from china. The leading Financial News organization of china has been charged by the Chinese Government was extorting money from prospective advertisers or clients or businesses in order to prevent or publish certain stories. In other words, the idea is they were extorting money and cooking their reports. That is illegal in china. They were charged with that. This is a great area for american journalism because it is true news organizations all over the country have long been seeking advertising from people they also cover. But you may not extort. You may not threaten. The issue for the web, it seems to me, is that there are laws that put limits on what news organizations can do in terms of their own reports. Even in the First Amendment environment, there are things you cannot do. The penalty for journalism for publishing something erroneous is liable. Defamation that does damage to people that is something the courts have said you can take a claim about make a claim about. As i understand the web attitude about data and all the information they gather and what they put on their sites, there is an argument being made constantly that they have First Amendment rights to do whatever they want. In the case of the yelp data, it was a case of saying we are not going to do this. We are not going to misuse this data. But that is something they reserve the right to say and there is no kind of law that is going to put constraints on that. However, if you are looking at yelp, google, and other entities publishing after a fashion, even though they just call it aggregating, information that could do damage, theyre going to find themselves in the realm of libel if they are going to claim First Amendment protections. I think the question is, where is the control of this fast amount of data going to reside . Is it going to be considered a First Amendment issue or something that comes under a different kind of legal regulation . I think the web world will resist anything that puts constraints on them aside from voluntary ones. I dont know whether that is going to stick. To the questions i would open to the room. One is about the role of the First Amendment in the issues we are talking about around speech and regulation. Many companies and organizations operate in the public sphere and there are speech considerations. The second is, you added at the end some concern about resistance to regulation in the industry. I dont know if that is the core problem. I am going to interrupt and say the not so enviable task of following the professor and follow the same rules to ask you to keep yourself to one point and introduce yourself at the beginning. I am from the boston globe. Youre talking about regulation and legal issues. I dont know if the problem gets that far. In media, the classic way of expressing bias is not lying about people or providing distorted information. It is about what you decide to cover and not to cover. You can have a huge impact on businesses individuals based on whether you show something online or dont show it. One thing i worry about is facebook or google or Online Services could advantage or disadvantage certain groups or Political Parties by simply choosing to show more of that perspective and less of something else. They could advantage a company by showing more data related to that company and less related to somebody else. I dont think you can do anything legally about it. That is the thing that is much more concerning. I would take your point. I think the fact is as the power of these websites is consolidated, as they grow, unlike the boston globe, if you dont like the way you are covered, you can go somewhere else. But if you are a business covered by yelp and you are going to be impacted financially by where you lie in the advertisingdriven yelp rankings and yelp has the right to put you anywhere they want a stun whether or not you buy advertising, that is not the way the boston globe does business. Theres is not a viable alternative to being on yelps list. This is an area i believe yelp would claim First Amendment rights and they have been given them by the warts courts to put any list together on any basis. It is also true those lists are clearly capable of doing significant financial damage to someone. There are other responsibilities and considerations that come with First Amendment rights. I would disagree to an extent. If yelp or any other site is not being responsive to the user enter arbitrarily having the rankings and it is no longer useful, people will no longer use it. There are alternatives. They will go to the sites most useful for the users. They will do other searches. They will look on facebook and asked friends. Every time i am on facebook, someone asks about a good restaurant in boston. If any side is not being responsive to users or productive enough for him fo rum, people use alternatives and there are other sites. Libel is geared toward the individual publishes and whether it does damages that can be proven. If yelp and others are claiming First Amendment protections that goes with the territory as well. I wonder how that is going to sort itself out. Introduce yourself. Joel kaplan from facebook. Since we were referenced, im going to violate the rule and make two points. I will make them quick. I grew up in boston and love the boston globe. I find it extraordinary the notion that in the internet era were the most Significant Impact has been the small democratization and the ability of individuals to have voice the notion in the times when i grew up in, there was the globe and harold the herald. Now on the internet, everyone has a voice. They can have it on facebook yelled, any number of distribution mechanisms. Facebook is trying to provide the information to the individual that is most useful and interesting to them. If we fail people will stop coming to facebook and will stop using the newsfeed. The second point i want to make that is relevant to the topic of this session of startups is this issue of Liability Protection for Internet Companies that are just showing User Generated Content is probably the single most important protection that led to the proliferation of successful startups and the internet we as we know it today. It is a great point you brought up to start the conversation. I think you cannot overstate how important the intermediate liability is to the success of the companies around the table and the ones thinking about how they will reach their audience in the first place. If they will be subject to lawsuits for everything there millions of users put on the site those sites will not be created and will not succeed. I want to take that as an opportunity to shift our discussion to the sharing economy. In this session, we are joined by a number of folks lyft, airbnb uber. I was in germany and took uber home from my restaurant. I woke up Tuesday Morning to take uber to my first meeting and discovered it was not allowed to operate, may be illegal. Looking at how that has played out in the United States, it seems it is happening on the basis of municipalities. Different municipalities and states taking different approaches from a regulatory perspective. I am wondering about that in the context of, should we have a broader more uniform way of regulating some of the questions arising out of the sharing economy . Is there some advantage to more of a piecemeal municipal approach at this stage in the game . This is an issue almost every company is facing in some way. The Public Servants around the table are also dealing with this. Very interested in your thoughts as well. Move the mic closer. Brian worth with uber. The german court ruled uber did not have the proper permits to operate in the country. We are appealing and still operating in germany. Signups for uber gone up 590 in germany. People vote with their wallet. I think the german people are showing what they are interested in. They are interested in having Companies Like that operate in their country. We are hoping for a good resolution through the court system. As far as whether one solution, i think it depends on the country and what the solution is. We have jurisdictions we work well with. We have good relationships with cities. The state of colorado past peertopeer ridesharing legislation and set up regulations. It is a good regulation. It is something we work under. It is a good thing. There are other states where it is tougher. It is going to depend on the jurisdiction. One catchall solution that does not work is not any better than 50 different ones youre haggling with. My colleagues that run all over dealing with it city by city probably wish there were one solution as opposed to 50. In our space this is something local governments have traditionally dealt with as far as the transportation market. Companies like uber, i think we ought to work with those governments to come up with a workable solution. Molly from airbnb. I would like to make an important point when it comes to the sharing economy and regulation. For the most part, the sharing Economy Companies are dealing with regulations that have nothing to do with the internet. Airbnb, all of the regulatory issues we are working on around the world have to do with the laws o ur hosts have to comply within their municipality which have nothing to do with the internet read the internet simply enabled the hosts to do it more than ever before. Land use is regulated at the local level. There is no way around that. Landuse laws have good reasons to exist. They protect safety and other things we rely on. Thank goodness airbnb hosts live in safe homes. It makes it more complicated to advocate on behalf of our hosts in those cities, but i would echo ubers perspective that we have to work with the cities to figure it out. Hopefully, we can come up with a couple of solutions that might be applicable to thousands of cities around the world. Anybody else want to comment . Chris matthews with lyft. I agree wholeheartedly. We have patchwork legislation across the country. We are dealing with laws written before anything like what we operate was contemplated. In some cases, dating back to the 1800s. What we provide to local governments is the opportunity to move into a new generation of innovation. We work collaboratively with cities and states. I imagine congressional members will get involved in the conversation. For the most part, this is a localized issue. We help them understand how to address mobility. What lyft has seen as a desire to move towards the next level of innovation regulation. We can come to the city of boston and say we want to be able to provide a positive mobility option for citizens. But we can work with you to provide some datasets so you understand how people are moving around the city and become a benefit to the cities as opposed to offering some Data Collected for the purpose of Public Policymaking. I think we will have to partner with cities. We are already finding ways to work with these cities. That is just the next step. Very briefly, it is encouraging to hear the sharing Economy Companies talking about collaboration with local governments. I work for the city of boston. We are trying to craft appropriate regulations that address the Public Policy needs we have as well as ensure these kinds of new services can deliver benefits to citizens. The challenge we face is we have to look at these problems not only from the question here is a new service used by a small slice of the population that has certain selfregulating characteristics. When you think about a regulatory regime, that will apply not only to what exists today but also what comes after it, how these services evolve, what new services are created. There needs to be an openmindedness on the part of local governments but also a measure of caution that says what works for Transportation Company x may not be sufficiently protective of the Public Interest in a comes to Transportation Company y that starts next week. That is the balance we have. We have found most companies have been very open to working with us at the local level. It is a dialogue that boston is open to having. Adam . Adam connor, i work at brigade. These examples of collaboration with government is encouraging. In having worked with state governments, federal agencies were first interested in using facebook. Collaboration is not the word of would use. It was we want to use your service. Here are the tremendous amount of things you have to do to let the government use your service. You have to do all the arbitrary things for the government to use your service for free. It was not necessarily collaboration. There were good people working to push it forward. I would go to a meeting in 10 government lawyers would say here are 32 things you have to change for us to use your free service. Why wont you embrace the spirit of working with government . There is a burden on startups for collaboration. We come back and say is there any world in which you might think about changing their policies were talking about modernization . No we are not going to change anything on our end. What is nice about the local model is many people in government are doing good work. There needs to be a chance to modernize things as well in government to allow new technologies, for agencies to use that. That is another part of the conversation. If we want to benefit through these new technologies, we need to make sure the rules are considered to modernize them. It is an unfair burden we willing to take on at facebook we were willing to take on at facebook. And startups dont have that ability. That is a tremendous loss for everyone. Tod cohen from ebay. I appreciate what my colleagues and theyre properly respectful attitude towards potential government regulation of their services and the need to collaborate at the local level. I wholeheartedly endorse them to do that. But with the reality that there are very entrenched economic interests that have every desire to put startups like that out of business. They work actively and have political power and engage in the worst type of regulatory models. We want to have a level Playing Field is the classic example. Therefore, we should have unnecessary burdens placed on new entrants that had nothing to do with the service underlying that. I am pleased to see what the german people are responding with. It is what people want. I would make sure you try to get in early and inoculate yourself. Try to make sure you find regulators not only captive but that understand what is going on. It is an example of fraternity hazing. We got hazed. When you join, you will get hazed when you want to join the fraternity. I appreciate everyone has the right attitude of wanting to collaborate and work with government. Lets be clear. There are a lot of people that want to stop the services and will spend effort and political power to harm. That is a great point. We are talking about startups and why internet policy matters to startups. We are thinking about every company in the room is pretty young compared with the much more established industries you are frequently dealing with on policy and regulation. It seems there are two challenges. One is a challenge of entrenched industry trying to protect their turf from challenges from unexpected quarters. Another might be a generational gap among decisionmakers. On monday when i was in germany i was meeting with a group of very senior german officials who had no idea what uber was. They wanted me to show it to them on my phone. This goes to adams comment about the challenges facing these institutions. What are the right strategies . What have some of the experiences been dealing with government institutions that ma