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- [00:00]
Alan
The Jack Welch Management Institute at Strayer University helps you go from I know the way to I've arrived with our top 10 ranked online MBA. Gain skills you can learn today and apply tomorrow. Get ready to go from make it happen to made it happen and keep striving. Visit strayer.edu Jack Welchmba to learn more. Strayer University is certified to operate in Virginia by Shev and has many campuses including at 2121 15th Street north in Arlington, Virginia. Welcome to the Monopoly Report the Monopoly Report is dedicated to chronicling and analyzing the impact of antitrust and other regulations on the global advertising economy. This week my guest is Professor Eric Goldman. Eric is Associate Dean for Research and professor of Law at Santa Clara University School of Law. He also co directs the school's High Tech Law Institute and co supervises the school's Privacy Law Certificate. I've known Eric for probably 20 years and have been a huge fan of his work. I'm a regular reader of his blog. He is absolutely excellent at taking complex issues and distilling them down into ways that us regular people are able to understand. So I am excited to get Eric's thoughts on Section 230 of the Communications Decency act and talk about how that impacts the digital ad space. Hey Eric, thanks for coming on the pod. How are you?
- [01:34]
Eric Goldman
I'm great, thanks. Thanks for having me.
- [01:36]
Alan
Well, good. Hey, I want to dive right in, and this is a bit of a meaty topic for the ad space, but what is section 230 of the Communications Decency act and what was its original purpose?
- [01:47]
Eric Goldman
Section 230 is a statute that Congress enacted in 1996. So it's an old school Internet law, and it says just in plain language that websites aren't liable for third party content. It's actually quite an intuitive concept when people think about it. When we think about who bears responsibility for the things that take place online, whether that's bad content or bad actions, we think the person posting the content or the person who's taking the bad action should be legally responsible for their actions or content. But the people in the middle of the conversation, like the services that enable those conversations to take place, should not be liable because they're not the ones who are actually speaking or taking the bad actions. And so this intuitive concept got codified in a statute, and when you explain it intuitively, people get that. Of course, that makes sense. But from a statute story standpoint, this is an unusual provision. It's something that we don't see in other areas of law as clearly so the law, I think, comports with a lot of people's intuition, but has gotten a bad rap for other reasons. I know. We'll talk about. The goal of section 230 was to prevent what's called the moderator's dilemma. The idea is that under the standard media liability rules, online publishers would have really two choices about dealing with user content. They could either take full responsibility for that legal content, in which case they would edit and supervise it quite closely, or they could. They could try to avoid liability for that content by claiming that they weren't editing and weren't taking any supervisory role with respect to the content, and hope that they could get away with that. And when Congress looked at that situation like, well, we don't really want to hold online publishers liable for all user content because then we know that the services are going to be quite selective and most people won't get a say. But we also know that if services don't take responsibility for user content, they don't take actions to try to police it, then it will be overrun by trash. And so that was the moderator's dilemma. Do you go high in terms of editorial responsibility? Do you go low? And Congress didn't want services to have to make that choice. They wanted services to decide what was in the best interest of the service and its users, rather than making that choice based on these dangerous legal options. That.
- [04:13]
Alan
That makes sense. And I guess intuitively I can see, like, you don't want to hold the telephone company responsible for a conversation that you and I are having. It just doesn't intuitively make sense. And that's sort of the same basic principle.
- [04:25]
Eric Goldman
Well, what would have happened without section 230 is that services would have tried to become more like the telephone company. They would have tried to claim some kind of legally insulated common carrier status. But to do that, they would have had to do minimal or zero content moderation. And that meant that the trolls and spammers and the bad guys would have taken over the service. And so that's not a win for society if a service dials down to its content moderation efforts to look like a telephone company. And Congress didn't want services to do that.
- [05:00]
Alan
So I'll get into moderation in a minute because I think that's a core component of at least some of the issues that we're grappling with today. But walk us through. Why was Section 230 so important to the health of both the consumer Internet economy and really the growth of the tech giants over the last 15 or.
- [05:17]
Eric Goldman
20 years when the Internet started. And I include myself in part of that because I'm an old timer.
- [05:22]
Alan
You and Al Gore, well, Al Gore.
- [05:25]
Eric Goldman
Is even older than me. I was using the Internet in the early 1990s and that was before the real proliferation of the Internet to the mass market. And at the time, the thought, or the fear was that the Internet was going to evolve into something that looked a lot like the cable services circa mid-1990s, that there were going to be a few giant content publishers, they were going to put their content behind paywalls. And so we would have a new set of options for delivery of that content. But the business models were going to look a lot like what we already had circa mid-1990s. And what happened instead is that we saw the emergence and growth of the user generated content side of things. And I mean, I think it's fair to say, I don't think anyone really anticipated that very clearly that that was going to be what we might call the winning app or the killer app of the Internet. That what people wanted more than anything else wasn't just to passively consume content. They wanted to be part of conversations with each other. And the Internet enabled new conversations that were not taking place anywhere in the offline world. So section 230 was really what turbocharged the switch from these paywalled content databases like the cable companies offered to what we sometimes call the web 2.0. The second iteration of the web, which was driven by user generated content. Section 230, by eliminating the moderator's dilemma, created the ability for services to come in and provide unique creative solutions to enabling people to talk to each other. And so without section 230 we would have an Internet that would look a lot like the old cable style model, the mid-1990s. And as we're going to discuss in a bit, we're almost certainly going to get back to that. So we've had a blip in time, so to speak. You know, for the last couple of decades we've had this preeminence of user generated content due to Section 230 and the legal protection provided. And that may not be at equilibrium.
- [07:36]
Alan
Yeah, it's sort of interesting and I think this has little to do with section 230, but we are seemingly heading towards the exact scenario that you outlined that we were afraid of is everything now is behind a paywall. And some of that has less to do with section 230 and what I would argue an overreliance on consent and if you can't engage in some flavor of targeted, reasonable, targeted advertising, well, really the only way to monetize is, is. Is via some flavor of payment.
- [08:07]
Eric Goldman
And to that point, Alan, I mean, I think it's a really great insight. One possibility is that all media ecosystems eventually devolve into oligopolies, basically small number of players with large content databases. And we see that if we look at other industries, whether it's movies or music, even book publishing or newspaper publishing, that they all devolve into oligopolies. Or in the case of things like local newspapers, they devolved into local monopolies. And so the Internet defied that seemingly inevitable fate. But maybe it was only for a period of time. Maybe economics has caught up with the Internet.
- [08:45]
Alan
Yeah, it's kind of funny because those of us who go way back and kind of remember like how proud we were that we were blowing up the entrenched incumbents who we felt were in the wrong. And as we now see that kind of the whole thing has started to come a little bit more full circle. We have become what we dreaded.
- [09:04]
Eric Goldman
Well, it's a great point because in the 1990s there was a lot of discussion about the idea that we could eliminate intermediaries. What we really were saying, I think, as it turns out, is that we're going to eliminate the current intermediaries, we're going to replace them with new intermediaries. And that actually is a reflection of the inevitability of consolidation and media ecosystems. And so there was a hope that maybe we could defy that law of economics for media industries, and we didn't.
- [09:31]
Alan
It's funny, and I don't want to get too far off topic, but I will say this. I've got a bunch of music industry friends out west and who have talked and know the Napster guys. And it's really interesting because the sentiment going in behind, I think what the Napster guys were trying to do was to blow up the, this evil empire of record industries. And the funny thing is, or maybe sad, because as a musician, it's kind of sad. What we've ended up with is arguably worse than the thing that we had in the 70s and the 80s and even the early 90s pre Internet. Anyway, I don't know how much that has to do with.
- [10:06]
Eric Goldman
We'll do that in a separate podcast. We got lots to talk about.
- [10:10]
Alan
So what role does content moderation by social platforms play here? And particularly in the. What I'm hearing is like the push for section 230 reforms.
- [10:20]
Eric Goldman
So content moderation was the whole ball game for section 230. The idea is that Congress didn't want services to dial down their content moderation to zero, and they feared that if the liability scheme was too onerous, that services would feel pressure to try to run the gauntlet to try and avoid liability by turning down their content moderation services. And what it really teaches us is that content moderation is not only a private service, it's a way of a service managing its environment for its audience. But there's a public good aspect to it that it's socially beneficial when services moderate content. And we want to give them legal incentives to do so. We want them to make choices not driven by the law, but based on actually protecting their communities from the various kinds of threats that are inevitable if you allow people to have their say.
- [11:13]
Alan
I think that makes sense in theory. I think what I'd like to talk about at some point is, well, it seems like the social platforms are moving away from a moderation scheme, and so that's having its own impact. Do you think it just we need more legal incentives for them to engage in moderation, or has everybody just thrown up their hands and said, you know what? The heck with it. This is too difficult, too cumbersome, too politically charged, and we're just not going to do it anymore.
- [11:38]
Eric Goldman
I don't know who pays your bills. I'm about to name some names which might blow up your economic strategy. So sorry about that. I think you're referring to Twitter X and Facebook Instagram, both of which have made concerted efforts in recent times to dial down the amount of content moderation that they're doing. And they're really doing that in two ways. One is that they're deregulating certain areas, they're removing restrictions on user conversations that they had previous implemented, and two is that they're outsourcing the content moderation function to the machines that they're turning over the determination of whether a particular item of content violates the existing rules to the machines, as opposed to having humans being the first line of review. And From a Section 230 standpoint, those choices are legally defensible. Section 230 didn't say you had to do all the moderation. It didn't have to say that you had to do the government's preferred level of moderation. It said you could pick as a service if you wanted to do full moderation, zero moderation, or anything in between. Section 230 treats them equally so from a legal Standpoint, everything that Twitter and Facebook are doing is consistent with section 230. Now the question is, could we change a legal environment to get them to do something different? And we have to be careful about what that something different is, because that something different might not be in the interest of the users that they're serving, and it might very well be in the interest of some existing power source looking to consolidate or control its power. So when we think about doing something different, we have to ask, who wants that? What are they going to do with that power? And how will that affect the overall allocation of responsibilities in our society? Having said all that, many of the things that people hate the most on the Internet, things like what we might call, for lack of a better term, hate speech or what we might call incivil behavior, those types of content are all protected by the First Amendment. So even if Section 230 weren't on the books, there would be no legal compulsion for any service to do anything about those classes of content. And those are the things that people usually are objecting to the most. Another category of content that is also likely protected by the First Amendment that people object to is misinformation. So to the extent that those classes of content create no legal liability for the services, change in section 230 won't change the services attitudes for them, and it won't motivate them to do something more. And so anytime I hear people say, well, let's change section 230 and services will be better, A, I want to know what the power allocation is behind that. But B, more importantly, I'm skeptical because most likely the thing that's being targeted might be backfilled by the First Amendment protection, in which case there's no legal change that matters.
- [14:42]
Alan
Okay, so I'm going to just show my ignorance of section 230. I was under the impression that there was a good faith requirement implicit in there in terms of moderation. And I think you can argue that with respect to X, it's hard to make an argument that there's really a good faith moderation attempt taking place. So where am I wrong?
- [15:03]
Eric Goldman
So you're not wrong, but I hate to be so blunt, you're also not right. So let's talk about how you manage that. Impressive feat, but this is a very common set of questions. So I know that many of your listeners are thinking this, so thank you for being the spokesperson for your audience. So Section 230 has several operative provisions, but there are two main ones. There's Section 230, that says, as I described, that services aren't liable for third party content. Then there's another part, Section 230, that says that websites aren't liable for their removal or filtering decisions that they make in good faith. So the words good faith are in the statute, but they're only applicable to section 230. Now, section 230 plays an important role in section 230's overall scope, but it's like the forgotten relative. It shows up in less than 10% of section 230 cases. And the most important reason why is because section 231 that says that websites aren't liable for third party content has been held to apply to claims over the removal of user content with the idea that even if it's the user who uploaded the content who objects to their own content being removed, it's still third party content to the service. And as a result, Section 231 answers the question, can the website be liable for removing a user's content if the user objects? The answer is yes. Section 231 can do that work. We don't even have to ask the questions under section 230C2. And as a result, when we don't ask questions on your section C2, we never get to this good faith obligation. Now, we could debate whether or not what Twitter or Facebook are doing as they dial down their content moderation efforts would still satisfy the good faith requirements of section 230C2, they almost certainly do. But we don't have to ask that question as long as C1 does the work.
- [17:03]
Alan
Got it. Well, that makes sense. So we're all about digital ads here on the monopoly report. And I want to just turn this around there. Like, why is 230 beneficial or is it beneficial to folks in the ad space?
- [17:17]
Eric Goldman
It's critical to the advertising ecosystem. And frankly, I've always been a little disappointed that haven't seen advertisers more aggressively stand up for section 230 because it almost certainly provides them substantial benefits. So let me talk about a couple of ways that it does so. First of all, Section 230 enables services to offer self service advertising options without Section 230. The starting premise is that the websites will be liable for every ad they publish as if it was their own editorial content, which means they would have to put all the advertising through a standard level of editorial review before it would be allowed to be published. That slows the process down and it screens out ads that might actually have been appropriate but were too risky. For the publisher and it raises the publisher's costs. And as a result, it raises the advertiser's costs. So advertisers get cheaper advertising options that they can configure for themselves because of Section 230. Without Section 230 it's going to look a lot like the old newspaper environment where in order to get an ad run, there was a multi layer review process that costs a lot of time and money for advertisers. Now, another benefit that Advertisers get from section 230 is they get a bigger inventory of content to run their ads against and a more diverse body of content to advertise against. In other words, if section two there weren't there, there would be less user generated content. As a result, there would be a smaller pool of content that would be available to run advertising next to. And so section 230 gives advertisers a more rich environment to play in. And finally, section 230 helps motivate services to engage in what we might call brand safety, that they will actually take steps to remove the kind of content that advertisers don't want to run their advertising against. You if the publishers didn't have section 230, then they might very well try to go back under the moderator's dilemma to the situation where they are doing a lighter amount of content moderation, hoping to avoid liability for that content. And that would mean that there would be more content that would not be helpful for advertisers to run their advertising next to. So really, Section 230 is, I think, a key explanation for why so many publishers have engaged in rich brand safety efforts. They have the legal protection to do so in a way that benefits the advertisers.
- [19:49]
Alan
That's interesting. So first, it's just an observation. In my experience, the advertisers in general choose not to participate in many of these public policy debates, at least not on a significant basis. And certainly so their influence relative to the dollars which they flow into the ecosystem, their influence is relatively small. And that's unfortunate. But that's sort of, I think, how they've chosen to operate most of these last 25 years.
- [20:16]
Eric Goldman
And just to note though, that advertisers have enormous impact on what publishers actually choose to do, what efforts the services make, because the services have invested heavily in brand safety, because that's what advertisers are demanding. And so, for example, Facebook recently dialed down some of its stances on content moderation. We don't know yet if Advertisers are going to be willing to play ball in that environment. If they don't, I guarantee you Facebook will change its behavior without any legal interventions because the advertisers have spoken.
- [20:45]
Alan
That's a fair point. And I want to make another point regarding brand safety, because in these, you know, within the, you know, the digital advertising world, there's always a, oh, here's an example of brand safety. You know, here's an issue where brand safety was not, you know, was not insured. Here's an example where something really fell through the cracks. Is your argument that absent 230 we would see a significantly worse brand safety environment.
- [21:09]
Eric Goldman
I don't know about significantly worse. We'd likely just see a different environment because the pool of content that advertisers would have available to run ads next to would be smaller and it would be more curated. Advertisers would in general benefit from the higher levels of brand safety. Without section 230. There would be just more editorial filtering going on in the services that are trying to reduce their legal risk by taking full responsibility for the content. Having said that, then that would mean there would be higher competition for those remaining spaces, which again means higher prices. Now for the services that dial down their content moderation, hoping to qualify for this, no liability because they're not moderating the environment. Advertisers could run ads there. But why would they do that? They would simply be opting into environments where they know that there would be minimal brand safety efforts and their ads will be on content that they probably shouldn't be monetizing. So I don't see a win for advertisers in that scenario. It's just different. But in the end, either you're paying higher prices or you're running against junk content. And I don't see where advertisers are going to benefit from either.
- [22:20]
Alan
So I want to turn to TikTok and the blackout challenge. And so TikTok's algorithm was arguably supporting a little Internet trend. Everybody remembers the Ice Bucket Challenge where everybody poured ice on themselves to support a great charity. So the blackout Challenge was a little bit more sinister. And there were literally kids who were watching other kids engage in this practice and severely injuring themselves. I think a couple of them died. And so there was a third circuit case that you talked about or you wrote about on your blog. Big fan of the blog, by the way. Anybody who wants to understand this kinds of stuff definitely go to Eric's blog. But I guess it feels like the platforms are relying on sort of a combination of First Amendment's free speech rights and a Section 230 to deflect liability here. And like, I guess my question is, what's your thought about how that. Because that seems like a, that's something that shouldn't happen in terms of kids dying because they're being exposed to something that a social platform is, you know, if not actively pushing is certainly helping to facilitate. Like how do we, how do we navigate all that?
- [23:31]
Eric Goldman
So let's start with the basics. Anytime that there's people dying because of social media content, there's human tragedy. And when it's children dying, we might even feel that more profoundly. And so we're talking about really sensitive topics here because our hearts go out to the families, we and our hearts go out to the children and their parents and their communities. This conversation though, can't take place without understanding some baseline facts. Let's start with the baseline fact about this thing called the blackout challenge. The blackout challenge is older than the Internet. It's certainly older than TikTok. So it's not a new thing that TikTok somehow manufactured or created. Now we might find other challenges or other means that take place on TikTok that are truly unique, that have never had a precedent. The blackout challenge happens not to be one of those. So to think that if we just got rid of the blackout videos on TikTok, there would be no deaths from blackout challenges, just as ahistorical. Now that's not a good thing, but it is a reality that we have to start with our baseline. The other thing is that it's often easy to think about a particular item of content on TikTok in isolation of all the rest of their content. Say, okay, when we pull out this genre of videos, these things called blackout challenges, these are horrifying. These don't belong on any service. They should be gotten rid of. But that's not how it presents itself to TikTok. TikTok doesn't go out and say, okay guys, we're collecting our challenges. Please bring us the scariest, most death defying challenges and let's aggregate them here and then we can share them to the world. What TikTok does is says, post your videos. And that means that there's billions of videos being uploaded and 1% of those is going to be the bottom 1% of videos that shouldn't have been on the site. But it isn't clear to TikTok in advance which is that bottom 1% or that bottom X percent. And so when we pull out a particular item of content, say, well, that shouldn't be there. I agree, but that's not how it looks to TikTok. When it looks at TikTok, they just see this endless flow of videos of varying quality, anywhere from the most brilliant thing that ever exists in human history to the worst trash that never should exist. And so for TikTok, the question is, how do they manage their service to try to get rid of the worst, amplify the best? And they're always going to make mistakes in that process. And their system, if it's automatically operating, is going to turbocharge or amplify things that TikTok didn't necessarily value. But that's just what happens when you have automated systems running the whole TikTok blackout challenge. As I said, it's just heartbreaking. I can't talk about without getting emotional for the parents and the. The child. But as a scholar of Internet law, trying to Talk about the TikTok challenge in isolation really misses, I think the point. It's a much broader problem that has no easy fixes.
- [26:23]
Alan
Where my brain goes is, well, if your algorithm, if it's reached the point where your algorithm notices it, does something else kick in. And that's a very logical way of thinking of things, but has absolutely nothing to do with how Section 230 works. And so if you did, not you. But if the world did, as I just said, once it gets the attention of your algorithm, it gets special scrutiny, does that just blow up section 230?
- [26:49]
Eric Goldman
To be honest, no offense, I don't even know how to talk about that. And the reason why is because every item of content is subject to some algorithmic decision to amplify or deprioritize. And so if you think about Facebook, for example, when you post a status report on Facebook, it gets amplified to my narrow set of friends, but it doesn't get amplified to Facebook at large. And so the idea to say, well, once it's recognized by the algorithm, well, every piece of content is automatically recognized by the algorithm and many items of content are promoted, but maybe not to the entire world, only to some subset. I don't know how to draw lines that matter there.
- [27:29]
Alan
That's a fair point. So we talked about TikTok, but do you see Section 230 more generally coming under attack? It seems like it is. And where are those points of attack coming from, in Your opinion?
- [27:40]
Eric Goldman
Section 230 is on the endangered watch list. It might even be on the extinction watch list. Section 230 is in trouble. And the short reason why is that there's no community that's standing behind it anymore. The Democrats aren't standing behind it, the Republicans aren't standing behind it. The Internet companies themselves are often not standing behind it. There is no constituency in saying, we want section 230, which is weird because every single person on the Internet, at least in the US but really in the world, benefits from Section 230 in ways big and small that they're going to notice when it's not around. And so it's one of these things where people take section 230 for granted. They don't know what the counterfactual universe looks like, and therefore they're not speaking out and standing up. So back in Trump 1.0, Trump first tried to adopt an executive order to essentially gut section 230. He didn't have the power under an executive order to modify Congress's statute. That EO didn't work. But that was a sign where Trump's head was. It was. I want to God section230. In the waning days of his presidency, after the election, but before he was removed from office, Trump vetoed a bill that would have been raises to the military because that bill didn't also contain a repeal of Section 230. Now, that makes absolutely no sense. The linkage between military raises and section 230 is non existent. Nobody could wrap their head around the logic that got him there. And in fact, it was so bad that Congress overrode his veto because they had to give raises to the military. But we have now two data points from Trump 1.0 that Trump isn't just coming to amend section 230, he's coming to repeal it. Now, what will happen in the Trump 2.0 era, nobody can predict. He is famously mercurial. But the data points we have is that Trump, by the way, that's the.
- [29:38]
Alan
Absolutely nicest way anybody has ever framed that.
- [29:42]
Eric Goldman
I don't know where your audiences are. If you have people who love him, I'm not looking to offend them. If you have people who hate them, I understand why. But the point is that what is he gonna do next? I have no idea, and I don't think he knows what he's gonna do. Having said that, section 230 is as vulnerable as Trump simply asking Congress to draft and pass a repeal bill, of which there will be almost nobody who will object to that bill. The Democrats won't fight it. The Republicans will be happy to do it. The Republicans are in power in Congress. That's all it's going to take. The only thing that's holding section 230 in place today is literally inertia. What I mean by that is that Trump is so busy doing other things that he hasn't decided to turn his attention back to section 230. If and when that changes, section 230 will almost certainly be gone. Now, even if Trump doesn't take any further actions, I will point out he has appointed heads of the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Communications Commission who both have made it clear that they hate section 230 as well, and they will be using the powers of those agencies to attack section 230 no matter what the President does, no matter what Congress does. So they've got the executive branch working against section 230. You've got Congress poised to repeal it whenever Trump asks. And then if we want, we could talk about the ways that the courts have turned out as well. Section 230 is coming to an end, and I don't look forward to the Internet that's going to replace it.
- [31:07]
Alan
Isn't the big problem with the courts as much as anything that the judges don't understand either section 230 or how the Internet has traditionally worked, or is it deeper than that?
- [31:18]
Eric Goldman
It's much deeper than that. And as we know, there's been a reshaping of the judiciary based on the judges who are appointed in Trump 1.0. Those judges just look at the law differently. And so a number of the Trump appointees have written anti section 230 opinions that have been nonsensical from my standpoint, that disregarded decades of precedent, hundreds of cases, and the judges just come up with a new story that says we're going to narrow the scope of Section 230's footprint based on things that I think are not credible, are not good judging. But as those rulings start to take root, and as Section 230's reputation degrades among the public, including among judges, those negative rulings have created beachheads for other anti section 230 judges to build upon. And so basically, the well has already been poisoned, and the poisoning is spreading throughout the entire water system.
- [32:15]
Alan
I love that analogy, as scary as it is. So this has been a great conversation. But before I let you go, you've been fairly critical of the California ballot initiative that ultimately led to ccpa. And, you know, now that it's here and sort of being enforced and, and I actually just filled out a data broker registry form which by the way, asked a whole bunch of questions that weren't. I'm not sure they're really legally entitled to know. But, but leaving that aside, like, you know, what's your sense of the CCPA at this point and how do you think that's all going to play out? How can you know California best move forward productively?
- [32:50]
Eric Goldman
So I have been a critic of the ccpa. I was an opponent of the ballot initiative, the cpra, and I have been an opponent of a number of attempts by the legislature to further amend and extend the CCPA and cpra. Basically, I think the entire effort has been misdirected from day one. And as a result we just keep digging ourselves deeper based on a foundation that's not adequate for its purpose. And I guess I would just start with a premise. I can speak as a Californian and I know some of your listeners are going to be in California. Can we point to any way in which the ccpa, CPRA or any of the branch off laws have actually improved any aspect of their lives? And we can just start with people's perception about privacy. People still think that there's inadequate privacy even though there has been now multiple years and tens of billions of dollars invested in California to change that narrative. And the CPA and CPRA created rights for Californians and most Californians have no clue that they have those rights and have never taken advantage of them. And as a result, we built this entire privacy infrastructure in California to give consumers greater rights that have had no clear impact on either their day to day existence or on any topic that matters to them. So to me, I'd say sometimes you hear the expression which I don't really love, but is the game worth a candle? It's like, show me that the tens of billions of dollars that California businesses invested had led to any outcome that consumers benefit. And until we have that evidence, we can start with a presumption that the law failed to accomplish its goals and we're just treading water or spinning our wheels, whatever metaphor you want, that the law is not actually solving the problem it was designed to solve. And so I don't see any evidence to the contrary. I've been waiting for people to prove to me that the CPA has made anything better and I just don't see it.
- [34:50]
Alan
So this has been a great conversation, Eric. I think we're going to stop there, but thank you so much for coming on. I really appreciate it.
- [34:55]
Eric Goldman
Thanks for having me. Appreciate the opportunity.
- [34:57]
Alan
Take care. That was a great conversation. So one of the things that we didn't get into, which I wish we had. Eric told me offline here is that his super secret hobby or passion is that he is a slinky collector. And if you're a boomer or a Gen Xer, that to me at least comes off as a super cool one. We've got a bunch of other fantastic guests coming up on the Monopoly Report over the next few weeks. Please subscribe to the show@monopolyreportpod.com or on Spotify, Apple, YouTube or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
- [35:35]
Eric Goldman
Thank you for listening to the marketecture Podcast.
- [35:37]
Alan
New episodes come out every Friday and.
- [35:39]
Eric Goldman
An insightful vendor interview is published each Monday.
- [35:42]
Alan
You can subscribe to our library of hundreds of executive interviews at marketecture tv.
- [35:47]
Eric Goldman
You can also sign up for free for our weekly newsletter with my original strategic insights on the week's news at News Market tv.
- [35:56]
Alan
And if you're feeling social, we operate.
- [35:58]
Eric Goldman
A vibrant Slack community that you can apply to join at adtechgod. Com.