Michael Beckerman | |
---|---|
Nationality | American |
Education | George Washington University |
Occupation | Lobbyist |
Known for | Net neutrality advocacy |
Michael Beckerman is an American lobbyist who is vice president at TikTok. Beckerman joined the short-form video app in February 2020, and leads its government relations office in Washington, DC.
Beckerman was the founding president and CEO of the Internet Association, a Washington, DC-based trade association representing Internet companies. [1] During his tenure as CEO, association membership grew from 14 member companies at its founding to over 40 internet companies. [2] [3]
Beckerman is an expert on internet policy. [4] [5] [6] He appears in the media to offer the industry's perspective on topical policy issues. [7] [8] [9] [10]
Beckerman received his BBA [11] with honors from George Washington University in May 2001. [12] [13]
Beckerman was appointed as president and CEO of Internet Association in July 2012. [14] [15] Prior to his appointment as head of IA, he served for 12 years as the deputy staff director and chief policy advisor to the chairman of the U.S. House Committee on Energy and Commerce, [16] [17] which oversees America's internet policies. [18]
Beckerman also is active in the local angel investing community in Washington, DC, where he has invested in local startups. [19]
Beckerman has testified before Congress on issues relevant to internet use, including privacy, [20] the sharing economy, [21] and social media. [22] [23]
In February 2020, TikTok hired Beckerman to lead its Washington policy operations amidst mounting pressure in Washington over its ties with China. [24] [25] In 2020, Beckerman compared the Chinese government's policies in Xinjiang against the Uyghurs to countering Al-Qaeda. [26]
Susan Ellen "Zoe" Lofgren is an American lawyer and politician serving as a U.S. representative from California. A member of the Democratic Party, Lofgren is in her 13th term in Congress, having been first elected in 1994. Lofgren has long served on the House Judiciary Committee, and has chaired the House Administration Committee since the beginning of the 116th Congress.
The United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary, informally known as the Senate Judiciary Committee, is a standing committee of 22 U.S. senators whose role is to oversee the Department of Justice (DOJ), consider executive and judicial nominations, and review pending legislation.
The United States Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law is one of seven subcommittees within the Senate Judiciary Committee. Created at the start of the 112th Congress, it was disbanded at the beginning of the 116th Congress, but brought back during the 117th Congress. The current chair of the subcommittee is Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT).
Michael D. Gallagher is an American businessman and political advisor. He held positions in the George W. Bush White House, including in the United States Department of Commerce. He was the president and CEO of the Entertainment Software Association, the trade association representing the computer and video game industry from 2007 until 2018. He is now the CEO of the Washington Policy Center.
NCTA – The Internet & Television Association is the principal trade association for the U.S. broadband and pay television industries. It represents more than 90% of the U.S. cable market, more than 200 cable networks, and equipment suppliers and providers of other services to the cable industry.
CTIA is a trade association representing the wireless communications industry in the United States. The association was established in 1984 and is headquartered in Washington, D.C. It is a 501(c)(6) nonprofit membership organization, and represents wireless carriers and suppliers, and manufacturers and providers of wireless products and services.
In the United States, internet censorship is the suppression of information published or viewed on the Internet in the United States. The First Amendment of the United States Constitution protects freedom of speech and expression against federal, stat, and local government censorship.
Michael Wayne Godwin is an American attorney and author. He was the first staff counsel of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), and he created the Internet adage Godwin's law and the notion of an Internet meme, as reported in the October 1994 issue of Wired. From July 2007 to October 2010, he was general counsel for the Wikimedia Foundation. In March 2011, he was elected to the Open Source Initiative board. Godwin has served as a contributing editor of Reason magazine since 1994. In April 2019, he was elected to the Internet Society board. From 2015 to 2020, he was general counsel and director of innovation policy at the R Street Institute. In August 2020, he and the Blackstone Law Group filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration on behalf of the employees of TikTok, and worked there between June 2021 and June 2022. Since October 2022, he has worked as the policy and privacy lead at Anonym.
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Walter McCormick, is a lawyer, former government official and former trade association executive.
The Internet Association (IA) was an American lobbying group based in Washington, D.C., which represented companies involved in the Internet. It was founded in 2012 by Michael Beckerman and several companies, including Google, Amazon, eBay, and Facebook, and was most recently headed by president and CEO K. Dane Snowden before shutting down.
ByteDance Ltd. is a Chinese internet technology company headquartered in Beijing and incorporated in the Cayman Islands.
Brendan Thomas Carr is an American lawyer who has served as a member of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) since 2017. Appointed to the position by Donald Trump, Carr previously served as the agency's general counsel and as an aide to FCC commissioner Ajit Pai. In private practice, Carr formerly worked as a telecommunications attorney at Wiley Rein.
TikTok, and its Chinese counterpart Douyin, is a short-form video hosting service owned by the Chinese company ByteDance. It hosts user-submitted videos, which can range in duration from 3 seconds to 10 minutes.
Carl John Nichols is a United States district judge of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia.
Zhang Yiming is a Chinese internet entrepreneur. He founded ByteDance in 2012 and developed the news aggregator Toutiao and the video sharing platform TikTok (Douyin/抖音), formerly known as Musical.ly. As of October 2022, Zhang's personal wealth was estimated at US$55 billion, according to Bloomberg Billionaires Index, making him the second-richest person in China, after Zhong Shanshan. On November 4, 2021, Zhang stepped down as CEO of ByteDance, completing a leadership handover announced in May 2021.
Multiple governmental agencies and private businesses have imposed, or attempted to impose, bans on the social media service TikTok. Countries like India and the United States have expressed concerns about the app's ownership by the Chinese company, ByteDance, attempting to ban it from app stores. Countries such as Indonesia and Bangladesh have banned it on the basis of pornography-related concerns, while others like Armenia and Azerbaijan have implemented restrictions to mitigate the spread of information which could lead to conflict. Syria has banned it allegedly due to human trafficking into Europe and other countries via its shared border with Turkey. Vietnam has threatened to ban the platform if toxic content is not removed.
Censorship by TikTok affects material published by people on the Chinese social media platform TikTok. There is evidence that TikTok has down-weighted the posts of topics deemed sensitive by the Chinese government and Chinese Communist Party, LGBTQ+ people, disabled people, and certain African-American hashtags. TikTok's explanations for this vary, ranging from attempting to protect users from bullying to algorithmic mistakes.
In 2020, the U.S. government announced that it was considering banning the Chinese social media platform TikTok upon a request from then-U.S. president Donald Trump, who viewed the app as a national security threat. The result was that TikTok owner ByteDance—which initially planned on selling a small portion of TikTok to an American company—agreed to divest TikTok to prevent a ban in the United States and in other countries where restrictions are also being considered due to privacy concerns, which themselves are mostly related to its ownership by a firm based in China.
This is a timeline of major events in second half of 2019 related to the investigations into links between associates of Donald Trump and Russian officials that are suspected of being inappropriate, relating to the Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections. It follows the timeline of Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections before and after July 2016 up until election day November 8, and the transition, the first and second halves of 2017, the first and second halves of 2018, and the first half of 2019, but precedes that of 2020 and 2021.