Internet education foundation. It is three and a half hours. [chatter] hello. Alright, lets get going. He has a long day ahead of us. Welcome everybody. So, i am the executive director of the internet a dictation foundation which coordinates the state of the net conference. Welcome to the 20th annual date of the net which seemed to need to be insane because i didnt think we would get to the second annual. But there is a totally different story. I would like to make a profound Statement Today about what 20 years needs, where we are at what point in time, internet policy we are in time now looking back over the 20 years of internet policy, the ebb and flow. Something certainly new. We are we talk of internet policy because we feel like something is happening in the next 20 years will be even more exciting than the last 20 years. That said, a lot of the issues we dealt with 20 years ago are still in play today. We are at an incredibly important Inflection Point in history when it comes to connecting every american to broadband internet, same question we had 20 years ago. We are seeing the emergence of that issue this year. You see that reflected in the entire program we have today. A lot of the other issues like cybersecurity, same as they are then, they are now my privacy as well. Its an important time and we are really excited to host this conference. I will not go into details about how i feel about the issues because thats not my job, my job is curating conversations about them. The program will reflect in your thinking about other things we are thinking about when it comes to internet policy. In the coming months we went to post a conversation. Conversation about the next step. We will have a followup to this conference to focus more on the next point in time. Some housekeeping i want to do, the schedule is much bigger than it was last year. We introduced lightning tops and we have introduced salons. The schedule is posted all over the place. There is an app that you can use to look at the schedule. We have a lot of programming. Really excited about the lightning talks. About 100 people sent in proposals for lightning talks and salons and we can only accommodate Something Like 18. So i want to thank everybody that has been a lightning talk proposal, sorry we couldnt accommodate all of them. I went to i need to thank some of the sponsors and my Board Members. We passed out a list of Board Members we have and we are very grateful for them. You will see them, throughout the day introducing different people. I want to thank them. I have to thank the sponsors, because without people willing to sponsor the conference and sponsor a conversation to has among robust debate and not everybody agrees on the topics here, it is incredible that people would come out and allow us to create this debate. They include comcast, tiktok, meta, netflix, pepsi, verizon, workday, amazon, at t, discord, lumen, incompas, internet society, stand together, venable, american university, and special thank you to the lego group. A lot of the graphics you see around the space and online are a result of glen echos amazing Public Relations and media team so i went to thank them for an amazing job. That is pretty much it. There are four people, there is a donate button when you register for this conference, and last year one person debated donation to us. [laughs] this year four people donated, a fourfold increase. I am excited about that. They are my personal heroes this year, thank you so much. Forgive me for prattling on. Let me introduce the assistant secretary of commerce, principal adviser to the president on telecom and informational policy. Ntia is one of my. It in town, i used to work there a long time ago and the issues werent as they are today. Alan davidson is like a renaissance man of internet policy, he has been everywhere, done everything, he has been to brazil, america, google. He has been at the department of commerce even before. People dont know that he holds an engineering degree from mat as well as a law degree from yale law school. When i met him, he was working for cdt, the organization that created this organization. At attend the conference was conceived, he was board treasurer, so he is largely to blame for all of this. He is going to be doing a fireside chat with a guest from the Washington Post, the National Policy reporter. She was the first anchor of the taco policy tech policy at the 202. Kat, please. [applause] can i just say thank you . Yes, please. [laughter] thank you for that intro for both of us, but particularly i will say congratulations to tim on the 20th of these. Pretty incredible. I will say, he is right, i was at cdt at the time this conference started, and i was also on the idf floor. When the idea of the conference came up, we were skeptical. We said this is a brilliant idea, but really, can we do more than two are these . Completely [laughter] right. Clearly, there was a lot to talk about. So congratulations to tim horton and his whole team for 20 years of incredible conversations that have made us all smarter in the space. Congratulations, tim. [applause] sorry. Alan, thank you for that opening. It brings us right into a topic i wanted to start out with which is ai. You have been in washington for many czech policy battles over the years. What do you think makes the ai moment we are in right now different . I think we have captured the publics imagination and that is really powerful and something that we should all really take a moment and lean into. I will say as a starting point, i think we have all realized the power of ai, right, that Machine Learning and these new systems will really transform so much of our economy. I think there is a strong feeling within the administration that responsible Ai Innovation is going to benefit a lot of people, but the key is that we are only going to realize that benefit if we are able to also manage the very real risks that these systems are opposing today. I think that has captured peoples attention, but the potential benefit, and the path that we need to get ahead of addressing the risks. It has captured, the Large Language Models have really brought it up to the fore, you have been covering it for years, but it is really Something Special how much people are paying attention to it now. Last year you did a request for comment on it are accountability. Can you tell us something about the initial findings from that period . Thank you. We started this project about 18 months ago, before Large Language Models work will. Were cool. [laughs] the idea behind it was to say, if you want trustworthy the big question we raised in this project is what does it take to be able to hold a system accountable . What do you need to know . We got 1400 comments. It was like a huge amount. It touched a nerve. Thanks to who submitted it. And i think what weve heard there is real action we can take to make systems more accountable. We have a report that is coming out in weeks, not months. This winter, hes nodding and one of our main authors. There is work by the private sector to be done and accountability consequences for missing on what you said a model can do. And i think one of the things analogies we are using for this is the financial auditing. We have overall today in the Financial Accounting where we can tell if a company has latest numbers because we have an accepted set of practices about what it means to be in compliance with accounting rules and ecosystem of auditors out there who audit companies. Very well accepted. That is what we need to move towards. A world where we have real rules that people understand and ecosystem and army of auditors out there who know how to look at systems and understand and be able to prove keeping people private and safe and thats the world. When you think about having a system of a. I. Auditing from the government, what is the biggest object stack calls, is it talent, power . All of the above. We are so early. When you look at the level of transformation, we are very in this learning until a. I. Revolution. We have a lot of things we need to build. Part of our goal is identify those Building Blocks, starting with the rule space and giving the public more information to information so researchers can understand and set up better practices and creating this ecosystem, a world where we do have companies that are in the business of holding systems accountable. What steps do you think Congress Needs to take as they debate a. I. Legislation right now . There is a lot for congress to do. It is early days where they are interested in watching and trying to provide Technical Assistance where congress is getting engaged in this. There will be a lot to do here. Everything from how do we make sure we have the resources to stay in front. I think thats a key part. We think that innovation here in the u. S. And west needs to happen. Going to provide a lot of benefit for people and a lot that congress can do to promote that and we need accountability on the back end and congress can have a role that. On the part of accountability and towards setting up the a. I. Within nist. How ruin forming those efforts . We are about the a. I. Institute and big announcement, new leadership and congratulate the new leaders put in place and Enduring Institution for the u. S. We see them coming out in other places around the world and working closely. There is plenty of work to go around. This is all a product of the a. I. Executive order from the administration which is a symbol of the level of urgency that we feel in the administration about this. A strong accepts of urgency about the need to engage on a. I. Second piece is i think that executive order is probably the most ambitious government effort to date of any government to address all of the broad range of issues around a. I. And Safety Institutes is a big piece of it. And we are going to be working with the Safety Institute ourselves. And dealing with risks. I think it is across the board a very ambitious effort. We will lead legislation in this space, too. But for something we could do quickly and i am proud we were able to move in this space very quickly. Less than a year ago this spring, even nine months ago we started an effort to get leading a. I. Companies and language r large we got those commitments and moved to an executive order and it shows the urgency in addressing a. I. Right now and enduring theme and look at todays program. There is a lot of conversation about it and appropriately so. On that topic of the executive order and will be doing a request for open source and what do you hope to learn from that Comment Period . One of the most interesting things i think homework assignments that we got from the executive order was to give the report to the president by july. We have a date, we have a shot clock about widely available model waves for foundational models. What does that mean . It means what should we think about opening up making some of the key parameters around models that let people use them and its a very sensitive topic and we are taking the time to to think about it. It is hard to implement, there is an initial and open up these powerful models, how will we protect safety and security when they are open and anybody can use them for almost anything. Another competing view, which is that we want to make sure that opening up these models can be a way to promote competition, access, give more people the ability to use them in different ways and figuring out that path through and making sure its not just a few Large Companies that have access and control to the most important models that is a big assignment for us. We had a terrific listening session. There is more to come that we will be doing and request for comments that will be coming out. On this issue particularly, this is the one where i hear the most startups and venture capitalists and lobbying Tech Companies how are you weighing that as you handle this process . Its a terrific question and why it is important to get a wide variety of inputs and first was in session, Public Interest organization. We have tried to get input from a wide variety of stakeholders and public request for comment coming out the next few weeks and contribute to that and i think we will hold a public conversation and working with our international counterparts. I want to take a moment the importance for congress to act when it comes on a. I. , but over the last decade we have seen Congress Unable to act on many tech issues and areas where there is bipartisan interest like privacy. Why do you think a. I. Might be different . It is a great question and we have a lot of members of congress coming today and there are some key areas where we really would benefit from action and put privacy at the top of the list. If you asked many of us working in this space when this conference started 20 years we will be sitting here and wont have a National Comprehensive privacy law. Many of us would say we need one of those. And we would benefit from more of that action. The reason im optimistic about a. I. , it has really captured the publics imagination and because it is so useful, our kids are using it for homework assignments and people are using it in the workplace now. It is transforming our society and see members of Congress Engaging in a way they havent for a lot of tech issues and Tech Companies and government through executive action moving faster than any other major tech issue and may well be action here because of the urgency and people are reacting. While on the topic of congress, there was recently a kid safety hearing on capitol hill with c. E. O. s. You had a session at the white house with the kid safety task force. Tell me about how that impacted the discussions there. As a starting point, i would say these issues around the safety of our young people online and health of our young people online are massive and one of the things i hear about the most when i talk about broadband. Parents are really worried. And while we while there are still a lot of questions and research to be done about the impacts of the internet and Online Services on young people, i think the strong feeling among many of us is we know enough to know that we need to act and did have a listening session with leading Mental Health kid Safety Advocates and people from the white house, it was clear to everybody there was the time for hearings is over and the time for action is now and there are things that we can do. I cochaired this task force that the president set up of kids Online Health and safety with some cutrate colleague at h. H. S. And we have been tasked with a couple of things including putting out a set of best practices for industry and recommendations for families and policy recommendations and best practices for industry, we need to do more. We cannot say this is on parents now to keep their kids safe and cant say that kids need to stay offline longer or not need these services. We need to help them thrive online and industry has to help, too. You mentioned with a. I. And having an industry pledge would you do something in the area of Children Safety . Great idea. Well see. I think we are keenly interested right now in identifying those best practices. There are some very good innovations and they are working hard and we can help a lot by lifting up the good practices and asking people to make sure we are raising the floor here. While on the topic of social media and ask you about tiktok. We saw the Biden Campaign join tiktok and there are a lot of and ownership by the company bightdance. Do you think it precepts a concern . They will make their choices and assessments of how to engage with the American Public and tiktok is a popular application right now. I can say cfius about foreign investment. The administration has endorsed the restrict act which is how to create better tools to address these issues and this administration is focused on two important things. One is making sure that american data is safe and secure and the president has said that he wants that large platforms to be more accountable for the illegal or harmful content that is on their platforms and that will be true wrarls what the platform is. Last year when there was a debate about banning tick tock and said it would be a sure way to lose voters. And i mean our political calculations impacting how this administration thinks about its policy on tiktok. I think we have had a very clear line on this all along. And i think the secretary of comments were made in jest. We had a clear long on this. Tiktok is not available on any device. I cant use it, our team doesnt use it. We cant install it on our devices. And we have laser focused on promoting the privacy and security of data. It would be very damaging and will be damaging to our economy. I think it will be damaging, harmful for these families to no longer get online and ntia, trying to promote Broadband Access and build networks. A. C. P. Has been a key part of making sure we can deploy those networks knowing there is a Customer Base available and people are going to participate is what makes it more affordable and attracting, without a. C. P. We have a problem with building out networks for everybody in america. It is an Important Program and we are hopeful that congress will be able to act and part of the president s supplemental request and high priority for this administration. Can you tell us more specifically how the digital work you are doing under the infrastructure package might be impacted if this program goes dark . A