It’s only been a few days since Dinesh was appointed PiperChat’s CEO, and our little caterpillar has already molted and assumed the adult form of a C-list Valley founder/douche. He’s wearing a blazer over his t-shirt, his fingers always rest thoughtfully near his chin, he re-watches his own interviews and re-laughs at his own terrible jokes, puts way too much product in his hair, and he carries on the time-honored tech-world tradition of belittling and screwing over less-famous cofounders.
While the rest of the group cynically reasoned that Bighead should sit in the chair, being the least unpalatable pick for the job, Dinesh was Richard’s rational and sensible choice—video chat was Dinesh’s idea, and he knows the product better than anyone. And yet, as Gilfoyle predicted, his reign as CEO turned out to be a complete disaster, and while he responds to his first crisis with blame-shifting and entitled ignorance—two of John C. Maxwell’s 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership, by the way—he’s reduced to curling up in the house bathtub, getting a warm soak of failure.
What brought down this pillar of industry—and scotched what could have been a hilarious season-long arc of Dinesh as a puffed-up thought leader? It’s an Easter Egg from another era of Internet history. By neglecting to tick a box, Dinesh fell out of compliance with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), a real law passed in 1999 that requires verifiable parental consent before collecting information from children under 13. As a result, their video chat has become, as Erlich puts it, “a Sizzler buffet for the sexually deranged.” Richard discovers this by reviewing the site’s usage data, and Gavin Belson later learns this the harder and funnier way—after acquiring the app sight-unseen to further his epic pettiness—through a focus group with a gaggle of tweens and one alleged pederast.
COPPA was passed in the wake of ‘90s moral panic over the Web, which to some in the general public seemed to suddenly burst out of manholes across America and unleash a wave of porn, gore, piracy, tax evasion and degenerate gambling onto our streets. Congress answered by quickly passing COPPA. It’s a good law and a generally effective deterrent—though nobody has violated it to the tune of $21 billion, as Dinesh and Piper Chat appear to have done. That said, collecting permission slips on behalf of 12-year-olds seems a bit tame in light of, say, an Internet-connected teddy bear with unpatched vulnerabilities that can stream audio to and from their bedroom. Regulators moved on from thinking of the children and the porn and gambling industries got back to pioneering the secure online payments and streaming video technology we all enjoy today.
Another law passed in the wake of general public WTF about the early Web is the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which is a little more problematic. It criminalized circumvention of digital rights management, with the intention of stemming the tide of pirated music, video and software. But many argue it has also made the Internet less safe by discouraging security researchers from finding and disclosing software vulnerabilities. This was also the decade of the Clipper Chip, a proposed encryption technology developed by the NSA that enabled the government to hold your encryption keys in escrow so they could snoop on your phone calls if need be. This proposal died of aggressive opposition by privacy activists, disinterest from telecommunications companies, and not working very well. It was later replaced by the far more efficient system of unchecked global authoritarian surveillance we enjoy today.
A memorable artifact of this era is this July 3, 1995 cover of Time, which promoted a later-debunked study that suggested your children were jacking in to an Internet that was, by weight and volume, more porn than not. (By the way, where is that kid now? Did he ever un-see all that porn and get his regular face back? He’s like the Nevermind baby of Internet mass panic.)
We don’t talk as much about this bit of Internet history, though some of it is covered in W. Joseph Campbell’s 1995: The Year the Future Began, if you’re interested. But the sudden popularity of the Web and the flat-footed response from policymakers and law enforcement galvanized Internet activists and organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation to fight aggressively to protect individual liberties in what was then quaintly called “cyberspace,” as if it were somewhere else—work that continues to this day and is more important than ever.
I’m sure this is precisely what the writers of Silicon Valley intended to convey to us by referencing COPPA. And as Richard seeks to build his “new Internet,” perhaps we’ll learn more about some of the current Internet’s technical and regulatory lock-in dilemmas whose only reasonable solution is to burn it all down and start over. However, spoiler alert: this isn’t the first time a bright and well-intentioned person has tried to build a “new Internet.” More on that later, if the show goes there.
Pedant’s corner: In this episode, Erlich insists repeatedly that the grammatically correct way to describe multiple erections is “hards on,” using the same plural form as “attorneys general” or “courts martial,” assuming that “hard” is the noun and “on” is descriptive. This actually seems sort of reasonable. On a related note, Apple has stated that they would like you to refer to their products without the definite article—e.g. “iPhone” and not “the iPhone.” Here, I believe a similar plural form would be delightfully precious. iPhones 7 Plus. Macbooks Pro. Carry on.
Matt Corwine is a writer, tech worker and expat Seattelite in Brooklyn. This is his third tech bubble.
