Ctrl-Alt-Dissent

Still, I’m grateful for the experience I’ve gained from teaching those courses. Every semester, I learn something new about myself or from my student evaluations, and I can feel myself improving with each course iteration. In a way, that trial and error has beautifully positioned me to finally teach Internet Law this semester, and to teach it well. For the first time in my teaching career, I’ve taken off the training wheels. I’m riffing. Lecturing feels more like a Ted Talk. I’m in my element. And I love it.

One major challenge I’ve encountered so far is my pacing. Prof. Goldman warned me about this. There’s so much to talk about. Internet Law is so much more than a doctrinal course. It’s the study of technology, sociology, public policy, political theory. And when I combine that with my real-world practice insights, we can spend hours on something as seemingly simple as “what is the Internet?” What IS the Internet???

The problem is that I only have from 8:30 to 10:00 a.m., so I need to put some guardrails around the more esoteric material.

But enough about me. What really makes this class interesting so far is the class itself. My students.

For starters, teaching technology law in the Midwest is fascinating—especially coming from Silicon Valley. Last year, I taught AI Law and Policy, a course I had previously taught as an adjunct at Santa Clara Law. I’ve since replaced that course with Internet Law, as I’ve found that AI (for now) can naturally exist as its own unit among the broader Internet Law doctrine. My students at SCU were generally more accustomed to the kinds of conversations we had about technology and its broader influence on society. In the Bay Area, we are surrounded by technology and technology companies, so these concepts weren’t particularly foreign. I could prioritize depth over breadth. And if anything, I found SCU students were sometimes a bit jaded about technology and its place in our world.

But you should have seen how my AI students here in Northeast Ohio reacted to the idea of self-driving cars. I had mentioned it merely in passing, only for it to become the centerpiece of that day’s lecture. Seeing students light up over technology that, to you, feels almost mundane—I mean, you can call a Waymo for just about anything in the Bay Area—is kind of magical. There’s this underlying curiosity, yet natural skepticism, that is a joy to tap into out here.

Which brings me back to the first week of Internet Law. The course is primarily discussion-based, which gives me an unusually clear window into how my students think about “the Internet.” What I’m seeing so far is an interesting split. Some students already love it. They see the Internet as a way to form communities and access knowledge and resources they otherwise wouldn’t have—something that matters enormously in more rural or underserved parts of Ohio (a perspective I admittedly lack). Others are far more skeptical. Some see the Internet as a tool that enables injustice and harm, and many squarely blame it for the current state of our democracy, or what they perceive as its unraveling. Some even perceive technology companies as the greatest threat to their freedom.

And I love this for a few reasons:

For starters, compared to the political and socio-economic environment at SCU, UA is a very different experience. My first year was a genuine culture shock. It’s not uncommon to encounter classes that are deeply divided along political and ideological lines. As a result, students regularly expose one another—and their professors—to viewpoints many of us may not personally hold or have previously encountered. In my view, that exposure is critical not just for introspection and growth, but for becoming more empathetic communicators and better legal professionals. I am constantly reminding my students that we have a great deal to learn from one another here.

Which is what makes our class discussions so rich. Internet Law is a deeply political subject because, as I tell my students, the Internet functions as a mirror of our society. Much of Internet law has developed around contested judgments about what should and should not be allowed online—judgments that often map onto broader beliefs about what should and should not be acceptable in polite society. Access to pornography is the obvious example (an issue saturated with ideological history). Inevitably, debates about what the Internet should be, or what it should permit others to do, are ideological debates.

Which is also scary for a pre-tenured professor teaching in a state that is increasingly encroaching on academic freedom and carefully monitoring any signs of “indoctrination.”

Still, I’ve chosen to charge ahead here. I have enough experience now facilitating these kinds of conversations here. In fact, this past semester, I worked with students to facilitate a town hall following a politically charged national event. You can imagine how charged that classroom could have been. And yet, it was a pleasant surprise. With adequate structure and space, students across the political spectrum were largely able to engage in respectful, substantive dialogue. This is the norm we should be encouraging as educators.

We need more of that in this country now than ever before. That’s why I will continue to challenge my Internet Law students to engage seriously with the hard conversations about the societal problems the Internet reflects (issues many of them may not agree on). One particularly strong back-and-forth we had last week centered on regulating the Internet for children. Some students want to see more responsibility taken on by Internet companies and believe the government has a role in ensuring that. Others felt just as strongly that the responsibility ultimately lies with parents. What made the disagreement especially compelling, though, were the personal stories students shared about how they themselves grew up with technology and how their parents shaped—or didn’t shape—their digital lives. Many of those lived experiences are deeply bound up with Midwest culture—perspectives that are frequently lost in Silicon Valley–centric “techlash” narratives.

My role in all of this is to teach students the law and the policy that underpins it, to push them to think critically about the human problems technology resurfaces, to show them how to express their viewpoints in ways that invite consideration rather than provoke retraction, and to help them hone their own moral compasses and principles they’ll rely on as lawyers facing difficult and uncomfortable decisions that they will one day have to make. I remind my students that if they choose to advise technology companies, they won’t be doing so from within a silo. They’ll encounter pushback and debate from stakeholders with competing interests and values that may differ sharply from their own. Learning to navigate that friction, within an increasingly politicized and complex landscape, is now an essential part of practicing Internet Law. At most, I’m a moderator of these discussions. My priority is that my students feel safe confronting their own views about technology and society, even when their peers (or I) disagree.

And while I do share my own viewpoints at the end of a robust class discussion—and will continue to do so under the principle of rejecting pre-compliance with academic censorship—I never belabor them. As much as I’d love all my students to love the Internet as much as I do, what matters more to me is that they learn to love the practice of good-faith discourse.