Olivier Sylvain — Reclaiming the Internet
Law professor examines how Big Tech captured the open internet and makes the legal and political case for taking it back.
Why we picked this
Sylvain is a legal scholar who has spent years thinking through exactly what went wrong with internet governance. This is a structural critique, not a rant.
Olivier Sylvain’s argument is that the open internet was a genuine possibility — not a naive fantasy — and that its capture by a handful of large platforms was a political and legal failure, not an inevitable outcome. His book diagnoses how it happened and what legal and regulatory tools exist to change course.
Sylvain is a professor at Fordham Law School and a former Senior Advisor to the Federal Communications Commission. He has written extensively on telecommunications law, platform regulation, and the civil liberties dimensions of internet policy. His perspective is neither utopian nor resigned: he believes the tools for meaningful reform exist and that the question is whether there is political will to use them.
The talk will cover the history of internet regulation, the specific legal doctrines that enabled platform consolidation, and what reclaiming the internet would actually require. Suited for anyone interested in technology policy, platform power, or the relationship between law and democratic accountability.