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00:00 I would make almost the opposite statement.
00:03 This is a set of regulations that really are groundbreaking worldwide.
00:07 Nobody else has done this.
00:08 And it's done in a creative and I think pretty sensible way.
00:12 So no, I wouldn't say that we're late.
00:13 If anything, we're a little early.
00:15 In a time when you have the IRA out of the United States as well, and you're trying to
00:19 get more investment into tech in Europe, the UK also trying to make itself a hub for technological
00:25 advancements of any sort, does this bode in any way positively or negatively then for
00:32 Europe?
00:33 There are some risks in all of European regulation of digital tech platforms.
00:38 If you look at GDPR, a number of papers suggest that it's been negative for innovation.
00:44 The Artificial Intelligence Act also carries some risks, and this one could as well.
00:49 So there are trade-offs to be made.
00:51 There are always trade-offs to be made.
00:54 Here the trade-off was that in terms of protecting European consumers and also in terms of protecting
01:00 European society from risks to elections, risks to public health, risks from lots of
01:06 different kinds of misinformation and disinformation, that it was warranted to take action now.
01:11 Good to see you today.
01:13 The DSA has five basic tenets, illegal products, illegal content, protection of children, racial
01:18 and gender diversity, and ban on dark patterns as well.
01:21 Of the big US techs, who's most threatened by this?
01:25 I would say by a wide margin, the biggest threat is likely to be Twitter.
01:32 Some of the large platforms like Google and YouTube have generally very mature and nuanced
01:38 processes for monitoring content.
01:42 Twitter is likely to have problems not only because their standards are a bit looser,
01:48 but more importantly because they may not have the physical capacity to do the kind
01:52 of monitoring that's going to be called for.
01:54 At the point when Elon Musk bought the company, they had about 7,500 employees.
01:59 Today it's about 1,500.
02:01 One has partly that's due to people being canned and partly they quit.
02:07 But one has to assume when that many people walk out the door, a lot of institutional
02:11 knowledge walks out the door with them.
02:13 So I would say that they probably are at greater risk.
02:16 Some companies will be at greater risk than others and some with less risk just in the
02:20 nature of their business models.
02:22 Among those 19 companies are companies like Booking.com and Wikipedia, which have very
02:27 different business models and probably relative to content moderation, different aspects,
02:34 different issues.
02:35 I mean, there's a lot of headlines, wasn't there?
02:37 I think, Scott, it was what, November last year where they actually shut their Brussels
02:41 office over at Twitter.
02:43 I say formerly known as Twitter X now, isn't it?
02:45 But in terms of, as you point out, the notoriously libertarian Mr. Musk as well, this is going
02:51 to be a massive threat to him and his team actually growing their revenues if they're
02:55 in loggerheads almost immediately, I'd imagine, on DSA with the Europeans as well.
03:00 It's going to be a real struggle for them to be libertarian and conform with DSA, isn't
03:05 it?
03:06 Well, this is exactly my thought.
03:08 Now, Mr. Musk seems to have, as you say, a very libertarian view.
03:12 Some Americans look at freedom of expression really almost as if it were a religious principle,
03:17 but that represents a misunderstanding both of America's constitution and also the jurisprudence
03:23 out of the Supreme Court.
03:25 A very important decision years ago, Justice Kennedy explained that freedom of speech was
03:29 never absolute.
03:31 There were always limitations for defamation, for fraud, for imminent incitement to crime.
03:39 He liked to say, "Your freedom of speech doesn't extend to the right to yell fire in a crowded
03:45 theater."
03:46 So I think he's going to have problems.