Alumn Anna Lenhart speaks on the Tech Policy Press podcast about her time on the hill working on tech policy.
So there’s this program called TechCongress, and they place mid-career technology fellows onto the Hill in various offices. So I got selected. It was an incredible opportunity. And when I showed up with the fellowship, I really thought I was going to go work on automated decision systems and algorithmic impact assessments and data rights, but I quickly got introduced to Congressman Cicilline’s antitrust committee team.
As I was starting to talk to them and really think about the work they were doing, I came to realize that a lot of the anti-competitive conduct they were looking at was happening at the hands of automated decision systems, right? So Amazon placing first party products in the buy box, or setting Alexa’s default shopping commands to Amazon eCommerce, or Google’s Ad Exchange is running real-time bidding on ad space that Google owns, right? Apple places their apps first in the App Store, right? This is a type of discrimination against new entries against startups, right?