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Big Tech social media platforms such as Google and Facebook have more influence over the marketplace of ideas than perhaps any other companies. Should the law treat them like telephones, telegraphs, and other “common carriers,” newspapers which have a First Amendment right to refuse to print content, or something else? The Supreme Court recently addressed this issue in Netchoice v. Paxton where a social media trade group challenged Texas’s HB 20, which imposes ‘common carriage’ like rules on large social media platforms. This panel will discuss this case and how it dovetails with other issues surrounding speech and telecommunication law such as Net Neutrality and Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.
In addition to Brandon Carr from the FCC, the discussion will include:
Judge Glock is the director of research and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor at City Journal. He was formerly the senior director of policy and research at the Cicero Institute, a nonpartisan think tank based in Austin, and a visiting professor of economics at West Virginia University. He writes about the intersection of economics, finance, and housing, with a perspective informed by his work in economic history.
Glock’s work has been featured in National Affairs, Tax Notes, the Journal of American History, NPR, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal, among other places. He is the author of the book The Dead Pledge: The Origins of the Mortgage Market and Federal Bailouts, 1913-1939, published in 2021 by Columbia University Press. He received his Ph.D. in history with a focus on economic history from Rutgers University.
Ryan Baasch is the Chief of the Consumer Protection Division in the Texas Attorney General’s Office. He previously served as an Assistant Solicitor General where he worked on Texas’s most significant cases defending the constitutionality of State statutes and challenging federal regulatory programs. He was counsel of record at the Fifth Circuit in Netchoice v. Paxton, where the Court concluded that Texas could constitutionally require dominant social media platforms not to discriminate against users based on viewpoint. Ryan earned his law degree from the University of Virginia, where he was an articles editor of the Virginia Law Review. After law school, he clerked for Judge Karen L. Henderson on the D.C. Circuit. He also practiced law at the D.C. and New York offices of Latham & Watkins, where he litigated constitutional challenges to State statutes and administrative law challenges to various federal regulatory programs.
Adam Candeub is Professor of Law & Director of the Intellectual Property, Information & Communications Law Program at Michigan State University. He previously served as Deputy and Acting Assistant Secretary of Commerce and Telecommunications and Information, an advisor at Federal Communications Commission, a litigation associate Jones Day and Cleary Gottlieb, and a law clerk for Chief Judge J. Clifford Wallace, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. He received his B.A. from from Yale and J.D. from the University of Pennsylvania Law School where he was articles editor of the Law Review.
Professor Candeub’s scholarly interests focus on the law and regulation of communications, internet, technology. His numerous law review articles and scholarly papers have placed him at the center of legal and policy controversies, and he often writes for popular outlets such as the Wall Street Journal and US News. Federal courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, have cited and relied upon his work.