Andrew McLaughlin

As I get older, it seems I’m becoming less a historian and more a fact witness. Confirming that trend, the Congressional Internet Caucus hosted a fun discussion on emerging Web3 policy battles, with Kevin Werbach and me assigned to draw parallels, contrasts, and lessons from the first wave of Web 1.0 fights in the 1990s - the era of the Communications Decency Act, the codification of Section 230, the first skirmishes over cryptography and key escrow, and so on. Sparking the panel, I suspect, was the clumsy cryptocurrency language in last year’s landmark Infrastructure Bill, suggesting some gaps in Congressional understanding of the latest stack of distributed and decentralized Internet-based technologies that is being referred to as Web3. There’s a lot more — good and bad — coming our way than cryptocurrencies and NFTs.

Our moderator was Danny O’Brien of the Filecoin Foundation, and our new-generation co-panelists were Cleve Mesidor of the Blockchain Association and the National Policy Network of Women of Color in Blockchain and Carlos Acevedo of Brave Software — all terrific thinkers and nimble panelists. Great conversation, part of the Caucus’s 2021 rich lineup of events. Thanks to Tim Lordan for the kind invite!