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There's a lot of talk about tech companies and antitrust these days, and a great deal of the focus falls on Amazon. But is antitrust law really the right approach, or even capable of achieving the results many people want? This week, we're focusing on one specific complaint that comes up a lot, about Amazon being both a marketplace and a seller in that marketplace and gaining various advantages including, supposedly, from the data it has access to. We're joined by Greg Mercer, founder and CEO of Jungle Scout, to talk about whether Amazon really has a data advantage, and how much it really matters.

The COVID-19 pandemic is far from over, and as it rages on we're learning a lot about technology's role in a situation like this — but it's also worth looking forward, and thinking about how tech will be involved in the process of repairing and recovering from the damage the pandemic has done. This week, we're joined by TechNYC executive director Julie Samuels to discuss the role of technology in a post-pandemic world.

This week we've got another cross-post, with the latest episode of The Neoliberal Podcast from the Progressive Policy Institute. Host Jeremiah Johnson invited Mike, along with PPI's Alec Stapp, to discuss everything about encryption: the concept itself, the attempts at laws and regulations, and more.

The standard operating procedure for most companies is to freak out about copycat products, and usually to use intellectual property laws to fight them tooth and nail — even at the expense of other aspects of the business that could use a lot more attention. Today, we're talking to the founder of a company that takes a more nuanced, less panicked approach: Dan Vinson is the creator of Monkii Bars, which launched with a Kickstarter that embraced and celebrated people making DIY copies, and he joins us this week to discuss a better way to think about copycats, and the advantages it brings.

As the coronavirus pandemic continues, nobody really knows what's going to happen — especially if kids start going back to school. Statistical models of the possibilities abound, but this week we're joined by some people who are taking a different approach: John Cordier and Don Burke are the founders of Epistemix, which is using a new agent-based modeling approach to figure out what the future of the pandemic might look like.

At the end of May, we launched the Techdirt Greenhouse — a new project to foster long-form conversations with a wide variety of experts about the most challenging and nuanced tech policy questions of our time. Since then we've been focusing on our first topic: privacy. Now we're wrapping that up and getting ready to launch a series of posts on our next subject, but first we wanted to sit down with one of our Greenhouse editors, Karl Bode, to look back on all the excellent pieces that we've published over the past few weeks. Check out the Greenhouse page here on Techdirt to catch up on the posts, then listen to the podcast for a wrapup of all the ins-and-outs of privacy policy challenges that our many great contributors brought to the project.

Attacks on Section 230 are relentless and coming from all sides — so we've got another podcast all about the attempts to ruin the most important law on the internet. This week, we're joined by Riana Pfefferkorn, the Associate Director of Surveillance and Cybersecurity at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, to discuss what is currently the most serious threat of all: the latest incarnation of the disastrous and nonsensical EARN IT Act.

As the debates about content moderation rage on, it is becoming increasingly clear that most people don't know a whole lot about how large internet platforms actually handle these decisions — namely, that they have teams of people who have been working and studying under the "trust and safety" umbrella for a long time. Recently, an association and related foundation were launched to help bring these experts into the public conversation, and this week we've got two of the founding board members — Adelin Cai and Clara Tsao — joining us on the podcast to discuss the actual process of addressing tough content moderation choices.

Last week, the attacks on Section 230 kicked into high gear with Senator Hawley's bill and the DOJ recommendations both coming out on the same day. As usual, the content of the bill and recommendations — and the discussion around them — is a huge mess, so this week we've got returning guests Emma Llansó and Cathy Gellis joining us to discuss just what's going on with Section 230 and what these proposals would do.

COVID-19 has thrust old questions about privacy into the spotlight, often with new and different framing, and raised the big question of whether our conception of privacy needs to change entirely in the midst of a pandemic. On this week's episode, we're joined by reporter, analyst and investor Esther Dyson to discuss the challenging ethical quandaries raised by the pandemic. Also, as a bonus, Dyson (who is a former founding chair of ICANN) takes a moment at the beginning to respond to our recent episode with Mike Godwin.

This week, we've got a special cross-post from 16 Minutes On The News — an excellent tech podcast by a16z that's well worth subscribing to. For the latest episode, host Sonal Chokshi interviewed Mike all about Section 230 and Trump's recent executive order about social media — and as you might imagine, it took a lot longer than 16 minutes! We've got the complete interview here on the Techdirt Podcast.

We're back! It's been a while since the last podcast, for obvious reasons, but today we've got a new episode following up on something we discussed with Mike Godwin in January: the Internet Society's proposed sale of the .org domain registry. That deal has since been cancelled, and some groups including the EFF assert that it showed ISOC can't be trusted to handle the registry, so this week Godwin joins us again to discuss what happened in more detail.

Last week, we featured the first half of a panel discussion organized by Lincoln Network, all about the concept of open internet protocols versus proprietary walled-garden platforms. The panel is moderated by Marshall Kosloff and features Mike Masnick, Cory Doctorow, Ashley Tyson and Mai Sutton, and this week we've got the second half of the discussion plus the audience Q&A.

Today on the podcast, we've got the first part of a panel discussion organized by Lincoln Network on a subject we've been talking more and more about around here: a return to an internet based on open protocols instead of closed platforms. The panel, which took place last week, is moderated by Marshall Kosloff and features Mike Masnick, Cory Doctorow, Ashley Tyson and Mai Sutton. In next week's episode we'll have the second half along with the Q&A at the end, but this week you can dive in to the first part of this wide-ranging discussion about protocols versus platforms.

Remember HQ Trivia? A couple years ago it was taking the world by storm and raising a lot of interest, and not without reason: it looked like it was resurrecting a shared live experience that seemed to be dead in the on-demand era. We featured a discussion about it on Episode 146. But the company has faced a rocky road since then, and recently announced that it would be shutting down — although, after this podcast was recorded, a subsequent announcement suggested it might get a lifeline. Either way, it's worth looking at what happened, so erstwhile podcast co-host Dennis Yang — who was both an early adopter and, to this day, one of the dwindling regular players of HQ — has returned for this episode to discuss the fate of HQ Trivia.