Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner said he “absolutely” trusts the government to “regulate the internet” during a recent appearance on “The Joe Rogan Experience” podcast.
“Who else is going to regulate it?” Wenner asked.
Host Rogan drills down on Wenner’s position during a two-minute clip of the nearly three-hour-long episode.
“You trust the people who got us into the Iraq War under false pretenses to regulate the internet?” Rogan asks. “Do you think that makes any sense?”
Wenner tries to clarify that it was politicians, not the government, who started the Iraq War. He then says, “In the end, yes, it’s the government.”
Rogan explains his view that the government would “regulate the internet in a way that suits their best interests … the same way they do with everything.”
He says the U.S. should move forward “with an ethic that respects truth and that appreciates opinions and reality and an understanding of things that’s not necessarily possible with corporate interests involved in the dissemination of information.”
Wenner counters that “there’s no way you can do that except through the government. Human nature’s not going to change.”
“The government’s not going to change either,” Rogan says.
Wenner replies that “the government is capable of change,” and Rogan can be heard sucking air through his teeth.
Wenner compares regulation of the internet to regulation of medication by the FDA, saying, “Drugs are tested. You don’t get too many bad drugs.”
Rogan then asserts that 25 percent of drugs approved by the FDA are recalled. A 2017 study found that about a third of drugs approved between 2001 and 2010 were involved in safety events.
In Wenner’s recently published memoir, he describes the internet as “a vampire with several hundred million untethered tentacles, the ubiquitous iPhone,” according to WIRED.
He told WIRED he thinks the internet “literally stole all the intellectual property of the magazine journalism world.”
“They repackaged it, gave it away free to consumers and sold it to advertisers at cheaper rates,” he said. “We were left on the floor dead.”
