This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

David Dunmoyer is the campaign director for Better Tech for Tomorrow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation.  He is a former resident of California. 

Lone Star Standard

What to you is the biggest contrast between California and Texas?

David Dunmoyer

It feels like a whole new country going from California to Texas. The biggest contrast for me has been culture. 

And it's the people here. It's not just the ability of walking down the street and people actually saying hello, or a two-part greeting. It's this notion that we are part of something in Texas. 

In California, there is just natural beauty in scores and great geographic potential, and all that has been taken for granted. I think there's this inherent understanding in Texas that we're part of something special, and that culture has been a difference that's been so neat and refreshing.

Lone Star Standard

Are there certain similarities in the heritage of Texas and California, despite the different outlooks and outcomes?

David Dunmoyer

Look at the history of California and juxtapose it with Texas. In Texas, folks were leaving the comfort of the colonies to come and homestead, and set up in what probably was at the time the most unsafe part of the world, with Comanches and Apaches and arid land that was meant to root out the people who couldn't handle it. 

In California, you have the gold rush. You had a lot of people who came there, and it was really [difficult] to make it, and again, leaving the comfort of your home to strike it big. 

Lone Star Standard

How did you get involved in tech policy?

David Dunmoyer

I found myself at the Texas Public Policy Foundation. initially I started in development. I started as an intern when I was in grad school. 

We recognized that it was time for TPPF to take up a tech policy initiative. In a former life, I'd worked on a couple of bills in California, when I was doing public affairs on the opposite side in their legislature. We brought on a full team, and it's been about two and a half years now, and the rest is history.

Lone Star Standard

Is Texas a truly free market state?

David Dunmoyer

That is 100% spot on. Elon Musk talks about the “woke” town square, that is the Bay area… where the software engineers and the folks that are working on developing social media companies or the next big AI company are infused with wokeness ideology. 

Contrast that with Texas, where we don't we don't do that here. We believe in faith, family and freedom, and you're seeing those values starting to really spread into the entrepreneurial landscape here. Those are the values that will span decades and centuries when your companies are looking to elevate humanity and really move us forward.

Lone Star Standard

Is Austin moving a little further to the right, especially given their referendum about policing a few years ago?

David Dunmoyer

That's 100% correct. I've been in Austin for four years now, so not as long as some of the folks who can speak to the decades here. To your question, it was homelessness and law and order, or the lack thereof, that were really the impetus for a lot of folks who were not conservative by any stretch of the imagination. [They] recognized maybe what I was trying to flee from in New York City and Chicago, which was being recreated here is, in fact, a net negative.

The people of Austin did vote to do away with public camping. When I first moved here, it was a pandemic. You could walk down Sixth Street, the 35 overpass, and there were full-blown tent cities that were set up there. It's since gotten better.

Then [there was the] defunding of the police, where Austin was ground zero in a lot of respects. The horrible tragedy is when you don't have well-funded law enforcement, and you start to see crimes not being addressed. Those issues are galvanizing folks to take a more moderate approach. 

There's still so much work to be done here in Austin, but at least those issues have crept into the public psyche of Austin. We want to keep it weird, but that doesn't mean homeless people who are panhandling and holding you at knifepoint, which was par for the course in 2020.

Lone Star Standard

What are your thoughts on the FCC’s announcement that they're going to bring back net neutrality?

David Dunmoyer

We're a state based think tank. We tend to work and operate in the Texas legislature, as pictured behind me, and we choose not to engage in a lot of national federal issues because oftentimes Congress doesn't act. We can provide education, awareness and advocacy, but we focus on Texas...

I saw what happened with net neutrality, or I should say the open internet order, which was that there were market improvements in efficiencies and economizing investments in the ISP market. Consumers were benefiting and reaping the benefits of having an open internet system. At that point, there was a natural experiment we had to point to: the Obama era administration guidelines of closing off and regulating ISPs, and the Trump administration opening them up. We have incontrovertible evidence which indicates that the current system...[the system that is going to be overturned], is the greatest for consumers.

[Back to] net neutrality in Texas, we decided this is asinine. [We published a research paper arguing that] the fact that the FCC...and the federal government are going to prioritize [this issue under the name of national security] is the worst possible thing [they] could do for consumers in the ISP market. There's so many things happening, such as border security, cost of living and all that, and also in tech alone...there are so many more pressing issues. 

Lone Star Standard

Where do you stand on the TikTok ban?

David Dunmoyer

In Texas, we're working on a number of data privacy bills. We had a huge win on that in the last session. A lot of what we're focusing on here is social media, data privacy and kids’ safety, and TikTok is one of the worst offenders when it comes to kids’ safety.

Just look at the difference between what ByteDance offers for their Chinese product versus the US and China. It's an educational platform that talks about pandas and animals, and how to get involved in different organizations that are going to help lift up the CCP. And then, of course, in America, it's digital fentanyl. 

There is the national security concern, which is that [Tik Tok is] a direct pipeline that feeds private, personal information of Americans to the CCP. Ultimately, it's not asking too much for the CCP [to not] collect Americans’ information and offload it to the CCP.