At the invitation of the College, Professor James Speta, from the Pritzker School of Law of the Northwestern University, gave a lecture on Information Discrimination: Regulation from Telephones to Internet Platforms to the students on Haidian Campus on the morning of 17 May, 2024.
The lecture was moderated by Director of the China-America Law Institute of the College Prof. Feng Kai. A/Prof. Che Hu from the Institute was the commentator. Prof. Liu Chengwei, A/Prof. Hao Weihua and A/Prof. He Qihao from the college attended the lecture.
At the opening of the lecture, Feng welcomed Prof. Speta. She introduced that Prof. Speta serves as Senior Associate Dean for International Initiatives and Elizabeth Froehling Horner Professor of Law at Northwestern Law and he is also the Co-President of the Law Schools Global League, and that he has made fruitful research achievements in the fields of telecommunications and business associations law.
Speta used examples including Facebook and Twitter’s removing a former President’s personal accounts to introduce the most intractable problem in US regulation of telecommunications and internet platforms, and that is the extent to which those privately-owned platforms can engage in “information discrimination” – by denying or degrading services to customers and other users. He said that it triggered worries that such companies’ dominant positions allow them to distort markets, elections, and reputations and the global nature of the internet makes this not just a U.S. problem. During the lecture, he reviewed the history of such communications regulation, the economics of information discrimination, and the challenges created by the rise of internet platforms, proposing a limited set of regulatory responses.
Che then commented on Speta's speech and discussed the Supreme Court’s case NetChoice v. Paxton and Moody v. NetChoice with He and Speta.
During the Q & A, Speta provided detailed answers to questions from China-America law students about information regulation and the recent TikTok ban. The students gave feedback that they profited a lot from the lecture.
