 Looks like everyone is here and getting settled I hear the crinkling of the lunches winding down So I think everyone's had a chance to grab something to eat So we'll go ahead and get it started Hi, everyone Thank you for coming today as we know this is an important and Somewhat unsettling time for supporters of the free and open Internet and we appreciate everyone taking the time today to discuss What's at stake in chairman pies? Planned net neutrality repeal Many of you know me but for those who don't or those who are tuning in online I'm Sarah Morris senior counsel and director of open Internet policy for new america's open technology Institute It's a mouthful. I know New America's a nonpartisan think tank and civic enterprise dedicated to the renewal of America American politics prosperity and purpose in the digital age Our experts work on a wide range of issues from national security to work family balance and of course technology and telecom policy The open technology Institute works at the intersection of technology and policy to ensure that every community has equitable access to digital technology and its benefits We promote universal access to communications technologies that are both open and secure using a multidisciplinary approach that brings together advocates researchers organizers and innovators And I'm very honored today to welcome congressman Mike Doyle as our keynote speaker for today's event as The ranking member of the House subcommittee on communications and technology Congressman Doyle is a leading voice in the fight for net neutrality He has been a steadfast champion for the open Internet and the FCC strong rules that millions of Americans asked for in 2015 In oversight hearings, he routinely holds the commission's feet to the fire and is a reliable advocate for the public interest We're honored to have him here today and tremendously grateful for his important leadership on this issue With that I'll welcome congressman Doyle up here Well, good morning It's a pleasure to be here today to talk about What I believe is one of the most important issues before policymakers today Net neutrality and its fate is a topic critical to our personal lives our civil society and our nation's economic future I want to thank the new America Foundation and the Open Technology Institute For hosting this event and putting this excellent panel together I also want to thank our hosts for inviting me to speak to you today Like many of you I've been working on this issue for over a decade and like many of you I had hoped that this issue had been resolved by the US Court of Appearance decision last year to uphold the FCC's rules However, as we all know that is not the case and we are once again Contemplating the way forward on net neutrality and what an open Internet means Chairman Pi and his allies among the ISPs and Conservative think tanks have alleged that the end of the open Internet really means business as usual and that the Internet We have come to know and love or love to hate will continue to hum along as usual The chairman and his allies have said that all they are doing is returning the internet to a quote-unquote light touch regulatory framework We have been seeing that phrase a lot when describing the proposed changes to the open Internet order The chairman and his allies say that they're returning the internet to the regulatory framework That allowed it to flourish before chairman Wheeler put the open Internet order in place in 2015 Sounds reasonable in a way Unfortunately, the chairman like so many other people these days is dealing in alternative facts I'd like to correct the record a bit about where we are and how we got there The history of net neutrality and the formation of the open Internet order isn't something that was conjured into existence out of nowhere the rules that Tom Wheeler put in place were direct responses to the actions taken by ISPs to Limit and peed or interfere with consumers broadband experience To be honest actions by the ISPs are the reason we have net neutrality rules at all Before that we had rules in place to limit what phone and cable companies could do with the information We entrusted them with and the services they provided to us ISPs anti-consumer and anti-competitive actions over the years are what prompted the FCC to adopt the open Internet order Republican and Democratic FCC chairs have recognized these basic facts going back to chairman Powell in 2004 he identified four freedoms the freedom of consumers to access the legal content of their choice The freedom to run the applications of their choice the freedom to attach any devices of their choice to the Internet and Meaningful transparency about their service plans pretty basic stuff Chairman Martin would adopt these four freedoms a year later case closed and the story the Internet is saved. I Honestly wish that is where it all ended The question is what happened to these freedoms and why weren't they enough more to the point Why wasn't there legal justification under title one of the communications act? Why wasn't that not enough? Well back in 2005 the Internet was really just the worldwide web Sites like Google Facebook and Amazon were still tiny Most of what the Internet offered didn't compete with voice and video offerings from the ISPs But that started the change and a small company called Vonage Started offering vote voice over the Internet phone service that directly competed with ISPs own offerings So the ISP blocked Vonage and claimed because it owned the network It was legal for it to block a competing service VoIP just blocked Seems crazy, but for context ISPs at the time propose limiting consumers ability to use Wi-Fi. They called it theft of services The FCC was able to use its authority at the time to resolve Vonage's issue But unbeknownst to many another ISP started blocking the popular peer-to-peer file-sharing protocol BitTorrent Thanks to investigations by public interest groups and technical experts. This was discovered in 2007 Then FCC chairman Kevin Martin tried to sanction the ISP to try to get it to stop blocking this new technology But his decision was overturned in federal court The court found that the Commission lacked the authority under title one of the communications act to enforce its policy statement in 2010 under Chairman Genekowski The FCC was once again faced with how it could prevent what had been considered Anti-competitive ISP behavior by both Democratic and Republican FCC chairs At the time several of my colleagues and I as well as many in the public interest community Called on Chairman Genekowski to reclassify broadband as a title to service in order to give his rules firmer legal footing during this time between 2007 and 2009 The iPhone was just hitting the market and the historically walled garden of the mobile internet was starting to crumble Despite the iPhone's clear capability as well of that as as well of that of mobile broadband networks at the time a Major mobile carrier blocked people's ability to use Skype Google Voice and other competing internet phone services on their devices These services clearly competed with the wireless carrier's own phone services. I Hope that some of you here are recognizing a pattern It's a pattern of ISPs acting in anti-competitive ways to force consumers to use the ISPs more expensive non-competitive services over those of their new competitors in In 2010 the FCC adopted actual open internet rules But still using title one of the communications act and while these rules were a victory as the panel and many of you here Know they wouldn't stand the test of time between 2010 and 2014 The ISPs would go on to hijack user search queries away from Google Yahoo and Bing to the ISPs own chosen search providers Several mobile ISPs blocked access to Google wallet Google's mobile payment service because they were developing their own competing services ISPs block users from Apple's FaceTime Calling app IS app dot ISPs have and still continue to require users to pay additional fees To share their mobile internet connection with other devices Another mobile carrier block users from streaming video on their devices Again and again We've seen ISPs blocking new services and applications that compete with them or in any way threaten their business model When the courts struck down Genekosky's rules the FCC was forced to go back to the drawing board under chairman Wheeler in 2014 now at that time Netflix customers were starting to complain that the service was being degraded and they accused ISPs of deliberately Throttling points of interconnection where a Netflix video crosses from a Netflix network onto the ISPs own network Net where Netflix alleged at the time that ISPs wanted exorbitant fees to end the slowdown At the time Netflix was a major player in the over-the-top market But it was one of only a few that were offering full-run video content that competed for ISP customers as More customers were considering cutting the cord and dropping their cable subscriptions The viability of services like Netflix was a major consideration If a consumer couldn't depend on being able to access over-the-top content it couldn't be a viable competitive option So in the midst of all of this the FCC again Debated the merits of title two or title one as legal justification for its rules And the fact that there just appeared to be no legally sufficient way to enforce rules under title one So instead of putting in place Unenforceable rules that would fail again under legal challenge Chairman Wheeler acted to codify legally enforceable rules meant to address the harms that had occurred and were occurring Now I want to apologize for this historical retelling But I think it's important context for where we are and how we got there Chairman Pi keeps saying that all he is doing is turning back the clock to 2015 But really he's turning the clock back to zero the order He proposes leaves in place no rules and no authority to address bad behavior He claims that the FTC can prevent ISPs bad behavior by holding them to their terms and conditions But ISPs are already scrubbing promises to adhere to net neutrality from their agreements and Openly discussing the merits of paid prioritization and fast lanes At this moment the FTC's jurisdiction over ISPs is in serious legal jeopardy Now I want to take a moment and recap the technologies and services that ISPs have blocked Throttled or otherwise tried to impede Streaming video from sites like Netflix Apple's FaceTime Skype Google search Mobile payment services Wi-Fi peer-to-peer applications the mobile Internet and apps And I just want to add that at one point a mobile ISP charge customers $5 a month if they wanted to use a mapping application at the time Google Maps was available for free But consumers had to use the ISP's own product and pay for it So why am I concerned about the future without net neutrality? Because if the past is any indication the future is not bright consumers Innovators and competitors are going to get the raw end of the deal one of the best parts of the internet ecosystem is that entrepreneurs have the ability to create something new and Make it available to the public and the public can embrace it or they can ignore these innovations as they see fit So while I may think Bitcoin is a crazy bubble or question the utility of the president's tweets These are platforms and technologies that are driven by consumer adoption and not by whether some Arbitrary gatekeeper sees them as a threat to their current or future business model The threat as I see it is not as great to big businesses like Google Facebook and Amazon Although there is a threat to them. It's to small companies and new technologies in Pittsburgh the city I represent we are leading the way in fields such as artificial intelligence self-driving vehicles smart cities technologies and robotics So many of these technologies live on the internet and they rely on always-on connectivity My concern is that these new technologies will be the next generation to be impeded and co-opted Cities like Pittsburgh don't need our smart cities or self-driving cars brought to us by X or Y ISP But ISPs are critical conduit through which these new technologies will function So as we look at what technologies will define the 21st century I for one am deeply concerned that the ones we are fostering in my city will be among those threatened by an end to net neutrality I'm currently circulating a letter to my colleagues in the house Asking chairman pie to delay voting on the order to repeal the open internet rules as Advocates experts and grassroots organizers. I encourage you to reach out to your member of Congress Ask them if they've signed on to our letter and if they haven't ask them to sign on now We're Phil. I think told me we've got a little over 40 members signed on It's funny some have signed on and then the ISPs have contacted them and asked them to take their name off the letter So there's little battle going back and forth But we want to get the grassroots out there and we want to get as many would love to get over a hundred signatures On that letter before we present it. So anything you can do to help us is is going to be sincerely appreciated But let me just say this regardless of what happens on December 14th This fight isn't over and so many as so many of you have done before and will continue to do We will continue to bring light to this issue and work for strong and forcible rules that protect consumers Protect innovation protect free speech and protect the free and open internet Again, I want to thank you for inviting me to be here. I'm sorry that my schedule today Forces me to get back on the hill But I hope you have a very fruitful discussion You have an excellent panel and I'm sure it's going to be an enjoyable afternoon. Thank you for inviting me And we'll just take a few seconds to get the panel up here and we will get started shortly. Thank you congressman Good morning everyone My name is Rob pecorero. I'm a tech journalist and I am serving a life sentence of covering net neutrality It's this has been going on I think at least 12 years in fact the first stories have written about it I think you can find on the Washington Post site anymore because of some CMS redesign that killed a bunch of links back in the the aughts We have here is a panel where Not everyone agrees about the scope of the problem of the solution. So it should be interesting Why don't I start by introducing yourselves and then we have some five-minute opening statements I do not have a gong to cut anybody off if they exceed that time, but I'll Give them the hook some way Matt you go first since you're closest to me Yeah, hi, I'm Matt wood. I'm the policy director at free press people who follows this issue will not have many doubts about where We stand on the current proposal to repeal all the rules But I think we'll actually have a lot of things to talk about today where we might agree more than we disagree on some of the problems with chairman pies proposal Gloria that was short and sweet Disintroductions and then going back and doing five minutes. We're gonna have to flip a coin to see who goes first I think how you wanted to you know Go at the end of everyone else's talk. So let's let's do the introductions then we can get on to her So Gloria Tristani, I'm a special policy advisor for the National Hispanic Media Coalition and HMC I'm also a former SEC Commissioner from November 1997 to September 2001 so I think I can speak to what was going on then My name is Hal singer. I'm a senior fellow at George Washington's Institute of Public Policy And I also teach at the business school at Georgetown University Hi everyone, I'm still Sarah Morris senior counsel and director of open Internet. We'll check again at the end of this talk Advocate general counsel at encompass and compass is a trade association We represent the internet and competitive network that are building networks Providing the contents that so many of us enjoy on the internet and as well as the transit providers that ensure that you're able to get that content All right, so who wants to go first explaining what what's the problem here exactly? Well, we talked about me at least giving an overview to people about what the order does I should say the draft order that chairman pie has been kind enough to release and let us all have a look at before they vote I bet most people watching are in the room follow this pretty closely. So I'll be brief on that and just make a couple other points Before we jump in everybody else. So the the order on tap now Congressman Doyle did a good job explaining where this comes from in the historical context but what chairman pie and his fellow republicans at the FCC intend to do right now is to abandon all of that history and Basically in this order they propose not only to reverse the classification of broadband and yes That's a mouthful that in 2015 the FCC decided once again that broadband should be treated as a telecommunication service Meaning something that transmits information for us Rather than an information service, which is something that provides information to think of it as the content on the internet Rather than the line that gets you connected to the rest of the internet That is not much of a surprise Chairman pie never liked that decision to classify broadband as a telecom service and basically had promised even before this proceeding started To undo that one of the things we noted was that he opened the rulemaking days after promising that he would quote win this fight So we think that's a funny way to open a rulemaking and claim you have an open mind about where you're gonna wind up at the end But that was really not much of a surprise What might have been a surprise to some people was the complete reversal and repeal of all the net neutrality rules And so as congressman Doyle alluded to as we might discuss today There are different ways of getting net neutrality rules on the books at the FCC One route that's been tried a couple times and failed is not using that telecom service was classification But instead treating broadband as an information service and seeing how that works out Well chairman pie could have tried that again Instead he chose not to try that and they have decided to remove the rules that the FCC has had on the books now for the last few years Against blocking throttling paid prioritization with people sometimes referred to as fast lanes and slow lanes and Basically everything else all that's left in place is a transparency regime Where so long as the internet service provider discloses to what they might block or throttle? That's basically okay You know sometimes the people in charge of the FCC right now will say that leaves it to the FTC But it's just kind of hoping that the FTC could enforce the promises made by the broadband providers And the way that privacy policies work in general is that as long as it's disclosed. It's okay, you know The FTC can prevent deceptive acts Meaning you didn't fulfill your promise and live up to what you told customer you would do But if you live up to that promise and basically block what you said or disclose what you said you would disclose Well, then you're generally okay under the federal trade commission precedence that we have in place So the order also does a few other things it bases everything on transparency. It tosses out all of the rules It changes the legal classification In the process it also tells states. They don't have a role to play here So it tries to preempt state ability to come in and fill the void Something that we saw a lot of state legislators try to do after the privacy rules were tossed out earlier in 2017 And it's a complete wipeout and so, you know, I'm happy to talk more later about why we think that's a problem I think the last thing I'll say though now is to go back to Congressman Doyle's remarks and to talk about this in the classification zone again But also in the in the with the notion that this is actually a reversal of the history We've seen here and an abandonment by the FCC of its obligations You said Rob that you've been covering this for 12 years I think there was a Chicago Tribune editorial over the weekend that claimed that neutrality was some new thing for the Obama era So I'm glad that you have provided for us this that was I was about 10,000 words into the topic at that point So it's like there we go first in 2008 2010 I witnessed testimony that this is not some new thing and The only thing I would not even quibble with about the way the congressman talked about it But hope to add to this discussion is that net neutrality was not really any kind of new creation Even in 2005 is a continuation of what Commissioner Tristani might talk about the FCC's long-standing policy of Preventing discrimination by telecom service providers So you have to understand it in that historical context and not think of it either as some new fangled thing or Even as some kind of results oriented decision if you ask us You know this was not the FCC looking for the right statutory authority to ground this thing called net neutrality on Just the reverse the FCC has an obligation to keep broadband networks open and clear from interference by ISPs and Once they return to that legal authority We think they got it right not that they were required to somehow find the legal authority But the authority was always there and they could simply left it behind So as we head into this discussion, I hope we can talk about that You know we can argue and we have argued as how can a test about how the FCC could do these kinds of things But I think right now what actually might unite a lot of people is the belief that the FCC has gone too far With this current proposal and that taking away any obligation that the FCC might have to prevent bad behavior by ISPs Is a bridge too far that we can argue about how they should do it But not whether they should do it and that's really what chairman pie wants to toss into the garbage can now is Any notion that the FCC has a role to play here? All right, who wants to go on it you want to go next glorious as we're talking about FCC prehistory here Yeah, yeah, and now before I get to that I wanted to say a little bit about the National Hispanic Media Coalition. It's been around for 31 years It's based in Pasadena the work we do here is to try everything to do everything We can to advance the interest of Latinos in their use of technology Communications and that means that we want not just affordable access, but we want an open Internet the open Internet has been A godsend for Hispanics. It's been a place where they can be business Start new businesses which they do at 15 Percent more than the rest of the population because they don't have the impediments of having to have a lot of capital It's been a place where we can tell our own stories It has been a place where we can be better educated better informed and also organize politically So I don't have to tell you about that, but I wanted to make clear where we're coming from We see the Internet not just as this place for entertainment for getting in touch with your family, but also as a basic civil right the right to be able to get your message out and Receive messages from those places you want to is a civil right and the place The the fundamental I would say public square of the 21st century is the Internet So for us, this is what is at stake? But let me go back to the FCC You know when I was there I love to hear how They never cared. They just let it go freely, etc. Well 20 years ago The Internet was a place for the privileged few. Yes, it was it was there But it was mostly wealthy families who had computers who had access to it What we were trying to do at the FCC was to get it out to the schools to the classrooms We got criticized for that we got criticized because we wanted to make sure that every classroom in America had access to the then Internet sounds very socialist. Yeah. Yeah, very very and And so that's 97 when I got in and when I was leaving the FCC. I didn't leave till September 2001 but in 2001 January there's a merger. I don't know if you remember at ALL time Warner Some of you might be old enough to remember that some of you may be remember that I held it up for three weeks and I held it up because I held it up because I had a little concern about something called instant messaging That was a big deal right back then This was the primary internet communication format that was in use and there was a concern that with this merger people who didn't use I am would be Slow down rattle or impeded from Using the instant messaging and I held it up till We kind of got in some kind of conditions. I don't know if they work To make sure that that didn't happen So we were already thinking about making sure that people could use the internet equally without impediments and without company favoring their own affiliate services Now it's an aside on a oil time Warner might have wish we had not passed it at all right, but that's another story fast forward what absolutely astounds me about what the PI Commission is doing is How this Commission appears to be ready willing and able to abandon Any statutory responsibility they have to consumers not only to protect them and to empower them You know, I've been watching the FCC ever since I left it and this astounds me You know even the rule that they propose to leave the transparency rules They're weakening that to a great degree They're making it even you know the terms of disclosure that the providers have to give you are much weaker I mean, it's just it's Unfathomable to me that they say well you can go to the FTC which you I don't really think you can right now But even if you go to the FTC they don't handle consumer complaints is consumer complaints They handle deceptive practices if they see a pattern they handle antitrust and that takes eons of time So if you're a consumer with a problem, you know, you wait five or ten years and then maybe you can get redressed I don't think I'm exaggerating and I think fundamentally The FCC is throwing the consumers to the dog You know, and I I've already given a little bit of introductory remarks about my organization And I will keep this brief so that we can get into the exciting back-and-forth exchanges But I know you all are here for But a few things. I mean, I imagine a lot of you are in this room today because you care about net neutrality But even if you're not even if you think net neutrality is the worst idea in the world My suspicion is that at least all of you are here because you care about something And that there are issues that motivate you and animate your political engagement or just your general engagement in society and Net neutrality is a principle that allows you to engage Mr. Tristani referred to this as the digital public square and that's very true without any net neutrality protection our Ability to collectively engage in these processes to fight against policies that we find problematic to organize around Social issues of today and tomorrow We will without net neutrality that will be at risk of being severely curtailed by ISPs and we know that internet service providers as gatekeepers have lots of incentive to Engage in shenanigans that interfere with our ability to access the content that we want online congressman Doyle gave a really great History a narrative of those harms So I won't repeat them here other than to say those are real the threats to our ability to navigate the internet and access Every corner of it are at serious risk if the Commission votes this order in next Thursday And I think Matt talked about things that were particularly things that were not shocking and things that are shocking I would add that a particularly shocking thing to me about this order And Commissioner Tristani hit on this as well as the complete abdication of Responsibility over consumer protections that the FCC is engaging in they are taking themselves out of Oversights in this space. They are punting to the FCC whose authority is under question given a decision currently Being reviewed at that in the Night Circuit Court of Appeals and further they are preempting states from any take from taking any action of their own There is that is all the cops on the beat at the moment and Going forward there will be no one in place to protect consumers And and so, you know that is of grave concern to us and I know Concern to others here on the panel and in the room In addition, you know, we will talk I think a little bit more about some of the concrete harms that we saw most recently leading up to the 2015 Open Internet Order interconnection disputes, which Congressman Doyle also mentioned Is it was a big one for the Open Technology Institute? We really saw that as sort of the new friends here of Where consumer harms were we're moving to online and where the most opportunities for the shenanigans I referenced earlier might might live We we were also Also pushed strongly to extend the 20 the rules that had historically in the 2010 order only applied to fixed broadband We had urged the Commission to extend those rules to mobile And you know that is tremendously important as more and more devices become connected over a 4G 5G network having the ability to preserve those those protections whether or not you're accessing over a fixed network in a building like this a Wi-Fi connection or when you go outside and suddenly shift to 4g mobile network And so those are two issues of particularly that were of particular interest my organization in the 2014-2015 Conversations around that neutrality. We were very pleased to see them addressed In the 2015 order and in addition to everything else that we have all the other concerns that we have about the particular order We are very concerned to see those specific protections go as well Angie Thanks for having Sarah really appreciate the opportunity at the heart of this issue is competition Right now consumers can access many different types of services and content online It has been an incredible Transition that we've seen take place so that consumers can get more choice They can access the video content that you want to they can access different job site applications They can access so many new and wonderful things. That's right at their fingertips. So why why would the Commission want to? Take away the protections that ensure that consumers can actually access all these competitive services It's because it's a threat Who's it a threat to it's a threat to the large ISPs the large eyes you to dominate the broadband delivery market who are monopolies consumers have No choice or one choice at their home Two-thirds of consumers have only one choice or two choices at their home And if these large broadband monopolies can then change who it is that you go see what it is you go see Charge them more so that you don't have to spend as so that you no longer get the savings that you're attaining right now Then that's good for their bottom line, but it's not good for consumers So this is why Compass is very very concerned about what it is that the chairman is proposing That the actual protections that consumers have today That ensure that they can reach the competitive services that they've come to enjoy that they've come to rely on Will also go away. Now. What have we seen happen since the 2015 order? We've seen faster speeds. We've seen more services. We've seen more online Content companies streaming companies come to market. We've seen dozens announced that they will offer Competitive services to ATT video product to Comcast video product to Charter's video product and to Ryzen's video product That's a good thing for consumers But that's troublesome for those four large companies who dominate the broadband space There's four large companies alone have over 70% of the of the broadband subscribers at their home So of course they want to see these rules sent away with so that they can charge their competition more online And who is going to pay for that? We're all going to pay for it. We're all going to be paying higher prices We'll be paying higher prices at the pump and then we'll be paying higher prices online. That's exactly what's going to happen So I urge each of you to get involved They know we as consumers want to continue to have our choices online We love it that our internet has gotten faster We love it that we have the opportunity to save money that I don't have to subscribe to Comcast video package That instead I can put my own package together. I can watch Hulu. I can watch Netflix I can watch whatever I want to watch online and you shouldn't be able to slow them down You shouldn't be able to charge them tolls at the interconnection point just because you're a gatekeeper So that is what we have at stake and encompasses going to continue to speak out and say consumers deserve to have choice And how you get the last word in this segment Then we're all gonna get into the actual sparring. All right. Well, thanks. Thanks for having me. I want to thank Eric No, I don't know if Eric sitting out there, but thank you. Thanks Eric for inviting me. Thanks there for having me I am accustomed to being the token economist on the DC policy panel I'm not accustomed to being the designated apologist for a controversial new order, but here I am My mom always used to tell me that if I didn't have anything good to say I shouldn't say anything so I'm gonna just take my five minutes and seat it back to Matt Woods so he can talk That was my attempt at humor. I am gonna say a few good things And to be fair and balanced I think I in my in my minimal time I'm gonna say two nice things to make my mom happy and then I'll say one critical thing of the order But before I get into my critique I think it's helpful to frame the net neutrality debate along the lines of three camps and tell you where I am the first camp believes in bright line prohibitions To go after things like paid prioritization and has expressed in the 2015 open Internet order the second camp is Reliance instead on case-by-case Enforcement adjudication pursuant to a non-discrimination standard along the lines of what was used in the 2010 open Internet order to police paid prioritization deals or the FCC's program carriage protections the third camp Also endorses a case-by-case adjudication to police net neutrality disputes, but this time pursuant to antitrust standards I When I when I learned that the FCC was heading in the direction of the third camp I quickly penned an essay expressing my concerns, and I published it in an antitrust journal And that's that prompted a reply by Josh Wright Which in turn prompted a sir reply by me on my WordPress page Which in turn prompted a childish Twitter spat involving Dallas cowboy gifts Which in turn prompted a piece in Bloomberg in which I was called a Principal at Economist Incorporated and quote frequent tweeter Which which in turn caused me to receive six wine glasses to my home that were emblazoned with the phrase frequent tweeter In which I presume we're sent by Matt So so with that wind up let me let me give you my my two Positives And my one and my one criticism The first was this the ban on on paid prioritization which came about in the 2015 order for the first time And and the reason why economists are worried about bands or bright line prohibitions They're good in some cases, but whenever conduct may may be motivated for efficiency reasons We don't like to ban it. We'd rather treat it on a case-by-case basis And the FCC in the 2015 order admitted in footnote. I think it's 312. I'll give you the exact one 315 I apologize admitted that certain applications such as telemedicine could benefit from priority delivery and To address this quagmire or this enigma what they did was create an exemption for paid priority for priority arrangements, but only if it were Deployed by the ISP itself. These were called the non-biased services. So think about what the FCC did there They they perversely in my opinion Encouraged vertical integration by ISPs into real-time apps, and I think real-time apps Is going to be the future the congressman mentioned smart cities today. We also have autonomous vehicles This is going to be a really important area for innovation and the question is why would we ever want it to be dominated? By by the ISPs themselves. So I would prefer To allow ISPs to contract with third-party independent providers of real-time app Services so long as this is critical. It's done in a non-discriminatory and non-exclusive way The second problem that I had with the 2015 order was the general conduct rule Unlike a more traditional non-discrimination standard, which is well understood and has been applied at the FCC I mentioned numerous times The general conduct rule was in my opinion a nebulous standard that was written with enough Subjectivity that it could produce any desired pre-ordained political result Non-discrimination is something that's very familiar to parties. They know how to prepare for it We know what the evidentiary criteria is for a complaint and to prevail And most importantly What what concerned me was that the chairman would serve as both the fact finder and the jury You know in the cases that I'm involved in these program carriage complaints We have an independent fact finder administrative logic JLJ Serving as the fact finder and the outcomes aren't aren't as politically infused So for that reason, I wasn't a big fan of the general conduct standard So to see it go doesn't cause me to lose any sleep at night. Now. I've been those are the two good things I had to say something good about this Turning to the bad thing or at least to a criticism or concern I have and that's the the the 2017 drafts order Leaning on antitrust as a way to police discrimination as you guys probably are aware in my article I've explained that there are some gaps in antitrust laws when it comes to policing discriminatory conduct really discrimination is not a violation under the antitrust laws and so while while I have some faith that antitrust can be used to to stop the most egregious forms of Net neutrality violations such as blocking or throttling. I do have some concerns still but antitrust at least by itself Can be used to police what I call the more mild forms of discrimination such as preferencing your own content To step aside and think about something outside of the ISP space when we think about Google Google is able to in search is able to give preference to its own properties Precisely because there is no price effect. There is no output effect It is merely steering eyeballs from site a to site B and this type of behavior allows it to skirt The antitrust laws and so if an ISP were to engage in the same conduct I think to the antitrust laws would not have much teeth here as well now To not leave you on such a just scary thought there are other things that are working in the background that will hopefully Provide for some protection against all sorts of violations. You know after all we do have Public scrutiny of what the ISPs are doing. We have John Brodkin's column which daily Tortures as excellent writer for ours technically please turn the light on all the things you're frequent tweeters though He needs to shut up about Boston sports already We have we have antitrust we have we have what ISPs customers could do we have the FTC enforcement So it'll be a it'll be an open question as to whether or not these things sneak through the cracks But I'll just I'll just leave you with one final thought Thought which is that so long as the as net neutrality policy is guided by an FCC majority These policies are going to swing back and forth with every election And so I'll leave you with that thought and we can think about how to fix this Yes, and that's the public shaming Please show me where it's been effective that Comcast has been public shamed enough into improving its customer service And to improving its behavior Can someone give me one example, please? I would actually add that we have a really good example in the interconnection disputes of where that absolutely did not work. We had months and months nine months of Significant sustained degradation of content that was happening consumers. We have a paper all about this called beyond frustrated consumers were on message boards Complaining about their their internet service providers and their inability to access certain types of content online generally Streaming video Teleconferencing things like that and this went on and on and on and on And it really wasn't until there was enough noise made in the context of the net neutrality rulemaking proceeding as well as Pretty substantial technical research done by my colleagues here And on the measurement lab team that we work with before those arms were totally Understood and there was not just the open internet framework that was under discussion There were major Murders that were proposed and the companies were being scrutinized as well as their behavior was being scrutinized and only then Was there some indication that this would be resolved that only resolved because there was an active FCC a cop on the beat What we have proposed right now is no cop on the beat and that is why we're seeing consumer backlash to the FCC's proposed order is who will be the cop on the beat So I will make some people's heads explode by agreeing with Ajit Pion one thing Which is he cites the example of AT&T blocking FaceTime in 2012 where they did relent on that after three months of getting Pillaried in the press so that it did seem to work there We actually were also prepared we meaning OTI and free press and public knowledge to file a complaint about that Precise behavior, and it's funny because Bob Quinn from AT&T wrote a blog post last week saying they never blocked anything And we said well yes you did I'll have to look that one up I could write about that too He said we said you blocked FaceTime and they said well that was for a special reason Which I think conceives the point right I mean we can argue about why they were blocking But they were blocking the use of FaceTime on their mobile networks, and so it was public pressure I think public pressure is part of this but it was also the real Threat I think is not really doing it justice but the real possibility of having the FCC Vindicate AT&T customers rights to use the applications of their choice So we've said a lot of talk so far in the congressman's speech and so far about what has happened in the past Where I want to sort of take this discussion Last January Tom Wheeler in his final speeches FCC chair asked where's the fire? What's the problem with the net neutrality rules? I want to take those questions and apply that to the present situation You know where there's definitely cases Comcast and BitTorrent in 2007 Verizon interfering with Netflix. I should note. I write for you how finance which Verizon owns I do not get a discount on my file spill for that unfortunately Where's the fire right now? What are the abuses that are going on? We think are going to happen After December 15th setting aside the inevitable lawsuits will get to that as well What where's the fire? What are the fires we should be looking for? There's a fire that NHMC has uncovered For those of you who don't know I Believe it was May 1 NHMC filed a FOIA request with the FCC saying We would like to look at all the consumer complaints that have been filed on the net neutrality rules since they went into effect and we asked for very detailed information We wanted carrier responses. We wanted all attachments. We asked for the universal complaints We didn't get We kind of did shame the FCC into actually producing some of this But we didn't start getting anything till after the common period was over and didn't get the bulk of the documents till mid-September we didn't get everything that we asked for and One thing I can tell you is there are at least 50,000 consumer complaints there were 18,000 carrier responses of which we got 823 pages I stress that 18,000 carrier responses that means there are 18,000 Occasions where the FCC said we're sending it over to the carrier so that they can respond and They did not produce that we were working on that we filed an application for review and may go further But here's the thing We've gone to the FCC and said put this in the public record. These are complaints by citizens about these rules It should be in this docket and the FCC had said no in the proposed order. They say no they say well We're told by I think it was either AT&T or you know one of the companies that They're they're not they're really not important. You know, they read them crucerily and they didn't see anything there Well, we're concerned because we haven't been able to look at the carrier responses. So we don't know what's there and One of the things that we were able to do in with our limited resources is do a preliminary analysis And we had an expert do this and one of the things that's really interesting about this analysis Aside from the frustration of you know, most of the complaint have to do with they're not getting what they're looking for And they're not getting the speed. They thought they were promised and but it's a way that consumers talk about What they want is they want access and they want quality access So we're talking about communication and the carriers talk about access and communications This goes all to the title too So the consumers don't perceive this as oh It's the information services. They want the access they want to be able to speak You're back and We have continued to ask the FCC to put them in the record and they continue to say no And so we're like is there something hidden is there a fire in these 18,000? carry responses and Even if there isn't much of a fire shouldn't the public know it shouldn't the FCC before it does away with these Consumer protections look at what consumers had to say They haven't looked at it. I haven't answered this too and I appreciate Rob You wanting to flip the burden of proof, but I think if you phrase it this way, it's a kind of a funny question You know why in the presence of rules that prohibit this behavior clearly have ISPs not engaged in it Well, there's your answer. We've had these rules on the books for the last couple years Before we had them this goes back to what mr. Doyle was saying too about pre 2015 and the revisionist history We think we're saying from this FCC. I would argue that we've always had some version of these rules in place They've been shifting legal rationales at times They've been in court and so in question in that respect even times meaning years But even when the FCC first back in 2002 did away with the telecom services classification for cable modem service That went to the Supreme Court and you know every time they've been either revised or thrown out in court The FCC has then launched a new rulemaking to address that again So the legal ground has shifted we think it's repressed and a lot of people do that we finally hit upon the right one again But there's always been some version of these rules in place and yet even with that When the rules were not quite strong enough to our thinking we had things like what Sarah was talking about with interconnection We had the kinds of mobile blocking or at least experimentation with mobile blocking schemes under the 2010 rules that AT&T engaged in retro PCS engaged in so yes, there have been some violations There's also always been at least some possibility of FCC enforcement Using what I talked about at the outset that non-discrimination bedrock principle that I think we all agree It has to be enforced from somewhere or else the whole thing is gonna collapse And we have seen it get close to if not collapsing certainly breaking down in place of like interconnection disputes no matter who was at fault There there were problems people were not getting the speeds they were paying for and not able to access the content of their choice And the motive to discriminate now and They certainly are going to do so once there are no rules to keep them in check from doing so So 22 million adults at the end of 2017 will have cut the video cord And they'll be relying upon over-the-top video services 22 million adults that is a threat To the video revenues of these large broadband monopolies that also provide video service That is what's going on here. What's going on is making sure that they don't have to face competition online They don't like facing competition online Streaming services are a threat to them Choice is a threat to them. They're gatekeepers. They like being in control and they like to be able to charge interconnection fees Backlane fees because that's money they then can use to send back to their shareholders. Guess what? These are public companies They have a responsibility to use their gatekeeper power to make as much money as they possibly can to give back to their shareholders and The government has a public interest to ensure that this incredible open internet This ecosystem that is providing more choice and more competition to consumers can thrive and the SEC under both Republican chairman and Democratic chairman have always Agreed that the SEC has a role to play To ensure that consumers will have access to this open internet platform to this ecosystem So that they can attain all the different choices Content have first amendment rights on the open internet and that is what is that threat here under this order The FCC will no longer have the capability because we have a chairman who says he doesn't have jurisdiction over it For the very first time we have an FCC chairman who says he doesn't have jurisdiction Hell I think I saw you shaking your head a little bit there Yeah, no, I mean a lot a lot of this has been covered I would say you know you talk about a fire that and we've been I think Rightfully trying to be concrete about what we see the the harms will the shape the harms will take if once once the rules Go away if they go away But there is a bigger picture harm I mean the internet has been the platform for innovation it has evolved into a digital public square upon which people can exchange ideas use innovative new services and grow this incredible economy and That is based on a framework of Regulatory oversight over to protect the open internet and protect the the principles of net neutrality That is going away, and so we may not see changes tomorrow or in January But this will lead to a dramatic reformulation of how the internet work and how Who who that's the parameters of where we go online? Okay, so one point I will make about over-the-top video servers is interesting enough today AT&T is bragging they've attracted 1 million subscribers to a direct TV now Which is an over-the-top video service, which is good for them I also wonder what's holding back the other traditional providers who are also bull-eating video subscribers. You think they would want to Now that AT&T is poaching their own customers. Maybe return the favor with the streaming service of their own That's something I hope there's a movement on that next year Well, this has always been kind of a club, right? I mean table operators don't like to compete against each other and AT&T to their credit with direct TV now Actually broke that mold and this is old telecom speak But they actually went outside of region and said we will offer you a video product Even if you're not our Customer or that wire even if we're not providing your connections. That was a big deal And I think that's why you see that the ISPs Paying at least some lip service to the notion like they don't want their content blocked. That's for sure I just think they feel like they can maybe work out those deals among themselves rather than having a more comprehensive FCC framework for them So now let's let's take the other half of Pies claim that the current rules are hurting ISPs How exactly he says there's uncertainty. There's paperwork burdens the one I've talked to Sonic a very good ISP in the Bay Area One of my members and Dane Jasper or their CEO said no, it's nothing. It's no big deal What's the actual? What's the damage done there? This is gonna be the Mountain Howl show I know well I'll go I don't I don't think it should be the Madden Howl show because one thing we should be talking about is the entire Ecosystems, but you know, we have challenged the notion that title to It's not really the net neutrality rule you see that the ISPs claim is hard and it's the legal framework And we have challenged the notion that it actually dampens investment We've shown aggregate numbers that say investment actually went up slightly on the aggregate after the order came out Other people have said that it went down in the aggregate, but then we also have to say that's not the only thing We should be looking at and that's both within the context of the ISPs themselves and in the context of the entire Internet Ecosystems, so we've talked already about streaming video service That's not the only thing that's grown in the last couple years But it's one of the things that's really blossomed in the last couple years in that AT&T direct TV now Statement is exactly what we're talking about People on the edge had confidence to put their services online and increase confidence But we also saw ISPs continue to invest some increased their investments Some decreased them about twice as many increased as decreased them and we would point to that and say look There's no uniform effect from this legal framework There's really nothing that is a single factor that either drives investment up or down when you look at the regulatory framework I think there's actually some agreement on that too when you peel back and get past the superficial debate About 5% higher or 5% lower And then you know even AT&T in their comments if you get again past the press release stage Says this is really a more complicated question There isn't some kind of on-off switch with federal regulations that we can flip and increase or decrease investment Although I take that back Randall Stephenson said the only thing that's gonna increase investment in the short term is tax reform So as usually say AT&T kind of telling two different stories in two different places But you know we think the burden from those rules is actually not demonstrated by the numbers and beyond that We don't really understand the mechanism for any such supposed burden because the FCC for bore from quite a bit of The statute and did not actually apply things that the ISP say they're afraid of like rape regulation Or other kinds of recording requirements that they had been prone to when they were providing plain old telephone service All right, so let me let me try to Explain the mechanism and explain the evidence on this point the mechanism is that even though the FCC did for bear from The price regulation aspects of title to there's no guarantee that that forbearance would persist It could go away in one of two ways you could have a new FCC chair decide to initiate a proceeding to relax the forbearance or you could have a Case brought for example by an encompass Encompass member under section 10 to challenge whether or not forbearance met the statutory criteria So in that sense what the ISPs were told was was basically trust us You guys keep investing at billions of dollars a year and we promise we will never come back and hit you with price regulation Now in terms of the evidence, I'll note that I want to take myself out and point to us telecom survey I'll note that in chairman wheeler's final speech at the Aspen Institute. He cited us telecoms annual survey As the gold standard for measuring what's happening with ISP investment now He he cited a comparison I think from 2013 to 2015 which is odd But the point is that if you if you use 2014 as the benchmark year that is the last full year in which The ISPs were free from title to regulation and you and you look to see what happened in 2015 or 2016 According to the US telecom survey Investment for the ISPs as a whole was down in both years And so that is that is suggestive. I'm not going to say it's causal proof But it's suggestive that that something happened here. We know that that when I Think it was in November when when the mere threat of title two was coming down AT&T CEO So that he was going to take an investment pause and what did we see thereafter? We saw AT&T starting to move into non broadband sectors. They invested in Mexico They bought direct TV now they're buying Time Warner and we've seen the effect that that's had On capital investment in the ISP sector So since you brought up we have my members I feel like I need to really jump in and talk about what it's like for the small ISPs who are Trying to bring fibers to the home and to compete directly against the broadband monopoly their biggest impediment to investment right now is that it's really expensive to lay the fiber all the way to the home and the number one thing that they talk about with us is getting access to the Infrastructure that is typically owned either by utility or by one of the incumbents in the area and largely it's full access And we would commend the chairman because the chairman is working to address the broadband deployment issues But these small ISPs They're not complaining at least in our membership They're not complaining about title 2 and they're not saying that this is affecting their investment And we have a number of them that signed on to the small ISP letter that had dozens of ISP Sign that said title 2 isn't hurting their investment Instead what hurts their ability to bring competition to the customer is how expensive it is to do this How hard it is to get access how unpredictable it is to get access to the infrastructure to actually lay the fiber Can I jump in because I want to get back to the consumer And theoretically the investment Benefits may benefit the consumer But one thing I think Angie said who's going to pay for all of it at the end of the day is the consumer And I want to go to the consumers that we represent Unfortunately Latinos and other minorities lagged far behind in access to broadband And if broadband becomes more expensive, they will lag even further One of the things this order does not look at or analyze and it did not the NPR and didn't ask is What are the societal benefits of being connected? How do you measure if Juan Ramirez in Tucson, Arizona Has a good broadband connection and can compete for the same job that I'm competing for versus Juan Lopez or you know, whomever in Denver who does not or who has the connection? I mean, how do you measure? the benefit of being connected to the internet and I know that's Difficult, but we're we're not think we're not talking about that. We're not talking about how important it is to education although our FCC Minority commissioners talk about the homework gap, you know, we're so many young people in this nation and they're mostly minorities urban poor or And so forth who don't have computers at home Who maybe have to wait to use it at the library and then the many who don't? How do we measure all of that? How does this fit into this investment? And you know, I would love to see this universe where there's going to be all this investment And they're going to go connect to those hard to connect places in rural America I don't see that happening and we're going from the concern about the FCC's promises To the promises of the ISP we're going to rely on their promises that they're going to be good actors The transparency rule says You can block if you tell them what you're going to block You can throttle if you can tell them what you're going to throttle You can have paid prioritization if you say you're going to do that Doesn't tell them how you're how you're going to tell them But it's it's giving you free reign to do whatever they want And you know they're going to do whatever they want to get their share Couple of follow-ups one interesting and I should have raised this more often on my own coverage of this The initial net neutrality rules exempted ISPs with under a hundred thousand. I think subscribers back in February that one was raised to 250,000 Not to the no blocking the no throttling the no pay prioritization in the general context Okay, good now second of all let's step back from this investment numbers debate because the real question like I don't really care if AT&T spent this much if they can deliver this much more with it Which is a point that we are made in that aspen Institute speech Are there other numbers we can point to just sort of get a grasp on a Have the current rules done any harm be suppose a year from now their repealed entirely What sort of numbers would convince you that oh this really did goose investment by lifting the title to regime There's these have increased Sends the 2015 order if you go on to the website of even the four largest ISPs that I've raised before and look at What the minimum offering is they're starting at 50 med That that is what the basic offering is and some of them are even higher than that The speeds have increased since the 2015 order Consumers are really happy with those feet One poll that I saw said 70% of consumers are really happy with how the internet has improved in the last two years Well, why is that it's because of all the great stuff. They're not getting over the internet, right? It's like you have a lot more choice than what you had so you know, I Would I highly question? What what it is? That's gone wrong. I can't point to anything that's gone wrong other than They really just don't want to live with these rules because they can't do the things that they really want to be able to do and that is Protect their own profits, right and increase those profits What the FCC should be concerned about is speeds and performance and And you mentioned the speeds are up I wouldn't ever say they're going up fast enough or that we can't have any debate about whether they could be getting faster and better more quickly But the FCC's own data and we talked about this in our Admittedly voluminous comments in this proceeding show that speeds have gone up since the order went into place So that because of the order is it despite the order we can we can debate that but things are getting better That's what the FCC should be measuring because just three more points on investment How use the dreaded word before sir reply so I hate to get into that territory but To that point speeds are going up and yet these companies are saving money sometimes because they have new technologies and efficiency gains from those A deep pie likes to talk about not micromanaging the internet imagine this sureholder meeting Hey guys, we're spending more money than we need to because we have to convince the FCC everything's okay No, that doesn't happen just the reverse if AT&T can save money and actually increase their speeds and their performance That's what they do and that's why Randall Stevenson among many of the things he said has said we're spending less next year This is in that same 2014 end of the year era and then in 2015 as well We're spending less but we're actually deploying more speeds are getting faster more quickly even though things like Ethernet As opposed to older technology or 4g are actually cheaper to build out So this is why when we look back at the numbers, you know AT&T itself has told the FCC in a different proceeding Maybe one their interest for slightly different Investment in infrastructure is this is AT&T's word lumpy We shouldn't expect it to increase year after year or even think that a decrease is a sign of lack of competition What they told the FCC was that we build out our network Then we sign up customers to it and we don't need to build it again next year So that's the kind of I would say natural variations cyclical variation that we see in that AT&T is itself recognized in the past That doesn't necessarily say, you know, if the arrow isn't pointed straight up for every single company Things are going poorly and it's right back to that same point We should be looking at the performance we're getting and the speeds that these companies are deploying as they brag about Increasing their speeds not simply at how many rod dollars are being shoveled out the door Yeah, and there's our observations from our small ISP members that are the third provider into an area at times Is that when they're building their fiber to the home? It's often against an incumbent cable operator sometimes an incumbent telco and The incumbent telco may just be have fiber what we call fiber to the known not all the way to fiber to the home And what happens is is when that third fiber to the home provider comes in The incumbents upgrade their networks So you will see AT&T also announced plans to build fiber to the home You will see the incoming cable system upgrade to the next stock system so that they could deliver faster speeds and These are great like we all love getting fast speeds We get lots of great content over the internet But prices drop So Dane at Sonic right now when he's delivering his new fiber to the home product in the Bay Area San Francisco to customers Guess how much they're paying for one gig Anybody want to take a guess? Oh, come on audience. You've got to get involved I've asked y'all several questions and not once have you gotten involved answer may make you angry Yeah, yeah, I guess how guess what the price is 40 bucks 40 bucks a month So in other areas it started at 70 bucks Now they're down to $40 a month and it gets to the point that Matt is making on the Efficiencies that are involved when these new technologies are being built. This is really great for consumers, right? So that we've said to the Commission that is the standard you should be looking at What are the speeds customers get when you have a third provider coming to market and what are the prices look like? That's really great for consumers. So you need to be Looking at the moonshot, right? Like this is should be what we're talking about not continuing to fight over net neutrality rules and as Sarah was mentioning taking away these protections It is going to alter the open Internet economy that we have today So I've spent a lot of my time talking about the video piece of this But also we think significant improvement and reliance on cloud computing Which my members care about a lot and the last year we've seen 38% increase in cloud computing and That technology along with the Internet of things that is going on means more and more reliance on the Internet And yet we're still debating what should be the open Internet policy of the United States I mean shouldn't said we'd be looking at the open Internet policy of the United States has worked really well And if the government takes away the consumers protections, they're gonna break it So how what what other members should we look at that if it's not cash outlay? Yeah, this is from and I and I'm I hear that I hear your speed argument But the concern I have there is that if these were going up prior to 2015 then the fact that speeds went up after 2015 doesn't tell you a lot about the effect of the order in contrast Investing no in contrast In contrast investment was going up every year from 2009 to 2015 and Reverse for the first time with your and and I'll admit Matt that that by itself is not a cause is not causal proof And you probably know what I think is better evidence We won't kill these people with a natural experiment from the from the early aughts where cable was not subjected to title 2 But DSL was and you saw cable Gee Piesman saying title 2 was a 2015 invention Just to finish just to finish that point what we saw was that cable not subjected to title 2 During this during this period of asymmetric regulation saw a faster accumulation of capital And then then did telcos and economists like to exploit these differences and differences or natural experiments They could hopefully tell us something about the incremental effect of title 2, but admittedly it's very hard I just want one point to agree with Matt is that when we're designing optimal rules We shouldn't just be looking at the effect on ISP investment We should also be looking at Investment at the edge and the problem here is that we just don't have very good data on what on what edge providers are doing Did the prohibition on on contracting with third-party real-time app providers stymie the development of real-time applications? Who knows I mean, how would you go about testing that because we would never get data on that and it's a shame because We we let we fight about the things that we can measure and we can measure the ISP So that that has kind of dominated the debate So I will point out that that those questions were not teed up in the NPRM and are certainly not adequately explored in this current order I think it There the the order presents a very ISP investment specific portraits accurate or not of what's happening in the internet Ecosystem and what's happening on top of the network is tremendously important Well, and what economic benefits from the openers? They don't ask about that how many new businesses and how many have they hired Etc. Etc. And I have to absolutely agree with Angie and and they'll be saying no word doomsayers But this will fundamentally alter the best most incredible communication system on this earth right now Here I can stop. I mean I think yeah, the US telecom numbers We just we simply don't agree that those are the gold standard So we've seen dips in investment before and I go right back to what AT&T said. This is something. That's actually cyclical So if you look at other numbers like us census data numbers There was a slight dip from 2013 to 2014 when title 2 was still just the twinkle and Tom Wheeler died You know, we think it's a little more complicated than that and then we aren't actually seeing any kind of decrease in investment But for all the reasons we've talked about that's not the only thing we should be looking at So let's move on to the transparency regime pie is proposing that the your ISP is gonna have to tell you what they're gonna do Two ways to phrase this how do you worry that they might? Comply in a way that is unhelpful or informative or if the lawyers here want to put on their evil hat How would you advise your ISP clients to? Subvert that as thoroughly as possible ensure maximum flexibility and how you run your business I mean if you're under an antitrust standard Where you're being held accountable for unfair deceptive practices my advice to my client would be not to disclose Practices to which you would have to be accountable for at the FTC The FTC doesn't as an agency have like net neutrality enforcement power. They're not the they have the power to enforce What the ISP's are telling their consumers and so this is a very very different Regulatory ecosystem than what we have when these problems are addressed with an expert agency And it's why we have expert agencies across a variety of sectors designed to deal with proactive rules-based mechanisms for protecting consumers. I traded in my evil hat Actually used to work for these companies I don't think they even have to though. I mean that's the thing if it really is as long as you disclose You're basically fine Like why would they even have to gain the system if they just simply say here's what we're gonna do if you don't like it Maybe you can switch to somebody else or maybe you can't yeah I was gonna say they can just avoid the $1,000 an hour fee of the attorneys and just look at the Transparency disclosures and see well they can do all the things they'd like to do They've been wanting to do as long as they disclose it well and let's Let's look at history companies have been violating even the rules that are in place and they get fine hundreds of millions of dollars and you know they also make Calculations how much is it going to cost me and I want to bring it's not it's a transparency violation of the 2010 transparency rule, but The commission issued a notice of liability against AT&T. I think it was in 2015 For a hundred million dollars for selling plans that had the label unlimited unlimited, but guess what they were not and that's simplifying it and AT&T said oh in One bill down the line. We told them we're changing this I'm simplifying the whole thing They made a calculated decision and they sold that plan a lot And of course that notice of apparent liability is sitting at the commission. We know it will go nowhere but Somebody recently used the term recidivist practices. They'll just revert to their recidivist Howdy, do you have any confidence you seem a little more bullish on the Transparency and case-by-case enforcement proposal then I fully expect Comcast to write into it's a disclaimer that they will not engage in discriminatory or exclusive arrangements Well, don't they have to as part of the NBC universal merger conditions until they expire at least Okay, January if I remember right at seven years from the closing of that merger, which is about January 2018 Which is I think next month So, you know, whatever good those were they're kind of about the time out Okay, so the FTC IG PI likes to say well, they were at least protecting privacy before the net neutrality rule the title two rules were enacted Do we have any confidence in their ability to resume doing that since certainly? Deceptive or abusive context or unfair or deceptive conduct that's in its core statute But as you know dates to 1915 PI likes to talk about 1930s talk on regulation We're gonna replace it with World War one antitrust regulation before most of them how many people had telephones back then in any ways and Certainly, we've seen in cases like the Vizio TVs that track your viewing habits in a really badly disclosed manner they Took some pretty firm action with that Yeah, I mean we we like the FTC, but we don't think they have the resources or the staffing or even the mandate to do this And I'm glad you brought up 1915 I mean, I didn't know laws came with expiration dates until a couple years ago So as you said unfair or deceptive at the FTC, that's way better than unjust or unreasonable at the FCC I can't tell you why that is I can just tell you how these agencies Implement or sometimes aren't able to implement their duties today and I think ask people Do you think your privacy is protected well enough? Because you clicked on a privacy policy that Google or Facebook or Apple put in front of you I don't think there's any there there a lot of the time Because people click and the FTC can only punish the most egregious examples of deception They've kind of muffled their unfair Jurisdiction and part of that statute and so you know again It's not that the FTC in theory couldn't do the job But when the FCC pretends that as long as we leave this here for them The FTC can kind of ride to the rescue seems to be wishful thinking at best It's not the equivalent You know to pretend that it's anything like what the FCC could do is Distinguished to say the least it's not an outright Sarah when you're also just thinking about these agencies as Regulatory spaces for seeking relief the FTC historically takes a tremendously longer amount of time to review problems and is Requires many more resources and she talks about thousand dollar an hour lawyers That is not a space that is easy to navigate when you are a startup for example looking for venture capital and worried about how you're going to navigate this new landscape of Paying ex exorbitant interconnect fees to augment interconnection capacity More importantly like that is not a friendly avenue for consumers who believe that they are being harmed by the existence of Anti-open internet practices That it is just not the same type one thing that the 2015 order did really well that I think is very frequently overlooked is that they Set up a very easy to navigate as Gloria knows now because there is so many consumer complaints a very easy to navigate complaint system and mechanism to review they had had an on Buds men they no longer do and There there was a way for people of you know any shaper or function in the internet ecosystem to go to the FCC and say I think that there's a problem here and it is just not that It's not that is not the case when navigating the FTC it's designed for for big and the FCC has Historically dealt with a lot of consumer problems. I don't know if you remember slamming and cramming and all sorts of issues They were good at that and and it was usually referred to the carrier and it was resolved and in those days They kind of tracked whether it was resolved or not not not these days by the way we asked we asked the FCC to tell us because there was a column in their data sheets and their excel sheets about the complaints and we asked them Why is there a blank in the resolution? They're posted on our website if you want to look for what it's worth my two Issues with this transparency regime or number one I propose to do away with the nutrition label style format the FCC was gonna let ISPs use as a sort of safe harbor So they can make this text Legalistic Liturgical I guess and the other thing is they don't actually have to have it on their own site They can provide the service the state of the FCC Which of course we all go to FCC.gov before shopping for in and access actually people here probably do Normal people don't do that Nothing I want to get to that this whole notion The opponents of the current role say that if we get rid of these if we allow ISPs to explore new business models Make it a two-sided market They can rake in money and use that to finance their their actual network build out Is there any precedent for anyone any ISP in the world actually doing that? collecting rent from edge providers data heavy sites and then saying see this let us extend service to x many more homes I don't think that there's Evidence but only because this market for for paid priority really hasn't developed yet I don't think there's there's a demand for it yet. There could be But it'll turn on on on how compelling, you know the case is for a real-time app Does it need it and wouldn't wouldn't an upstart app or edge provider be willing to pay? So if its packets are are treated with care I will say that if you go to the economics literature in two-sided markets We will find examples of platform providers using cash from one side of the market to subsidize the product on the other newspapers or Pretty obvious example if the Washington Post couldn't advertise we'd expect subscription fees to be higher The Bezos bucks help my old shop You know, I think how said there's no evidence that this has been tried before We've looked at the numbers and tried to run the hypothetical numbers We don't think Andy saying these guys would do this for their bottom line But we don't really think that there's the kind of cash there in the present market to motivate them to build out where they wouldn't And these guys when they pass a new home it costs a lot of money So, you know, you have to get to a pretty high level of extra cash on hand in order to not just say here You go shareholders There's a nice extra a little bit this year But to say this justifies us building out in areas we wouldn't otherwise have built to But I think we should talk to you about what but how and Andy we're talking about before the the competition angle here These rules and the antitrust part of the FTC and I guess what I want to say about that is that To use that old antitrust chestnut, you know, the laws about protecting competition not competitors Maybe expand that and say non-discrimination rules on a central communications networks are about protecting users rights Not just competition or competitors Protecting competition is part of that But it's you know, I net neutrality is not sort of an ersatz antitrust regime It just happens to be situated at the FCC. I'll talk about this a bit in that I thought of it again with two-sided markets You know, it's it's not you can't squeeze everything into an antitrust framework and say that would prevent everything that we would not like to See on the internet today. I like to think about cable TV here You know cable TV is not an antitrust violation to my knowledge People have made complaints about the negotiations in the carriage but that kind of tearing and bundling and grouping of content Based on the broadband providers choices or the cable providers choices in that context is not something most people are clamoring for online And that's why I think we have to think about protecting users access to the content of their choice Not simply looking at other kinds of two-sided markets and saying well If it's good enough for supermarkets as Darrell Issa said a few weeks ago, why shouldn't it work on the internet? I think at risk of getting into Ted Stevens territory the internet is not a supermarket even though people buy a lot of stuff on it Can I agree with Matt because it's so unfamiliar for me to say that breaking precedents all the time here It just feels good, but I would sticking with a cable example I'd go to my favorite 1992 cable act creating non-discrimination protections for independent content producers So so they could be guaranteed a level playing field against vertically integrated cable operators That's that's something that sat outside of antitrust and and I think serves As a template for for what I would prefer to be the you know the optimal set of rules So to again return to competition. What should the FCC been doing you mentioned things like? Infrastructure Paul attachment rights. Can you put your wires on the existing utility pole? Which I should know this has been going on for almost as long as net neutrality It was a big part in the 2010 national broadband plan under your chairman genikowski What should we be doing? What should Congress be doing to actually get more ISPs to more people's owns well So one level of competition that's happening is over the top So having an open internet policy that's enforceable is key In ensuring that consumers have access to choices because right now they don't have a lot of choice when it comes to their ISP They're not happy with that broadband provider Too bad. You're not going to be able to really switch at your home You're high the other high-speed offering may not be very high speed after all And you may not be able to access all of the content that you'd want to access So that for encompass is really key secondarily as you mentioned addressing and The governmental permitting that has to take place so that you can deliver Another alternative ISP is really important we have been working and the other FCC's proceedings on more deployment of wired and wireless infrastructure and we think that both are very Critical to ensuring that consumers will get more Opportunity to have choice in the ISP in the broadband marketplace But there are many things that need to be addressed in those dockets First and foremost is one touch make ready and guess who opposed of us Two of the very large ISP opposed one touch make ready. This is a People can correct. This is basically if you're going to start adding your fiber to someone else's poles You don't you have one contractor pick from the phone do it for you exactly streamlining the process of that our small ISP providers are not having to wait for each individual attachment on the pole to be moved because that's what happens right now it's Doesn't happen all at the same time It's sequential so months and months and months can go by and when you're doing a big deployment to a new neighborhood You can imagine there can be hundreds and thousands of poles that you need to attach to so it can be a very long process So whatever the government can do to speed that up. We think it's really critical We also think that working directly with the local communities so that they can help speed up the process should be permitted If the FCC is not going to do this, they should let localities do that. They should let the states do that. I Think it's sort of helpful at least for me to separate two types of investment and build out that we're talking about here And we've kind of danced around both of them one is how do you serve hard to our expensive to serve areas where the rate of return? calculation for What internet service providers whether they're incumbent or competitive is just a challenging equation to navigate It's just because they're the locations are remote or they're geographically isolated by the mountain or something It's just expensive to serve There are a lot and these are tend to be places where there are zero to one option And there are lots of mechanisms. There's been experiments with long experience with subsidies But that's a hard question that I think is probably outside the scope of this panel but but suffice it to say that like though An absence of net neutrality is not going to suddenly mean that the corners of rural Nebraska will be served next year Like that's just there's an entirely different type of calculation Or even that the corners of Washington DC are going to be started with an alternative Yes, but the other type of investment we've talked about is how do you make the network more robust? How do you make it better equipped to handle the growing? you know Content and and services that are existing online and that's actually like an easier question And and when we talk about two-sided markets the thing I worry most about a two-sided market in the where a broadband service provider is offering a service to customers while also navigating business relationships with other called them edge providers is that it makes it much easier to To play both sides of that market, right? You can charge more for consumers while also charging more for the the edge company services Which in turn will get passed on to consumers a regime with net neutrality in place Creates pressures on those ISPs to compete on the integrity of their service that they're offering to customers They have to do the thing that's making the money is how good their services these of the other providers in the area and net neutrality ensures that that's the playing field that they're Can I and you may but I think we've gone Far afield from net neutrality. Let me tell you what I mean I care a lot about broadband deployment. I live 20 years in New Mexico. I've been to the Navajo reservation I know how hard it is but all of a sudden it's I Am not convinced that there is evidence that it's the net neutrality rules that have prevented the country from being broadly Served and we agree there are so many other factors So, you know, we I'd love to have these conversations about competition, etc But they're not about net neutrality and I just want to bring that to the point. It's it's the Red herring. It's what pie is using to just to justify the bulk of what he's doing Which is radical and unprecedented and Abandoned the consumers. So I just wanted to make that really really clear So how you wanted to chime in on Well, I interpreted your question maybe more broadly at his policies outside of what the FCC could do Yeah, yeah, some of it. I mean Congress is when did the first dig once log it? I think law can put that out in 2009 So something that I've been calling for for years And I see some some democratic support for this notion But is to amp up the subsidies for low-income Americans whether they can buy more broadband And if you don't like demand subsidies, this shouldn't be mutually exclusive You can do cost subsidies to you could give ISPs a fiber tax credit to incentivize them to go out and deploy more fiber These are things that sit outside of the FCC But if you you want to if you want to ramp it up, that's that's where you go Actually, I kind of agree with you. I mean there is a program called lifeline That is subsidies for broadband and was supposed to be in the modernized Modernization lifeline order would have helped Connect but that that's all that's another subject we could spend hours on but yeah So what happens next assuming, you know, Ajit pie does not strike me as a man who is overly concerned about the things people say about him And his policies so it seems the FCC will vote three to two next Thursday mark your calendars We have a government shutdown Well Option one Presumably we're gonna have a round of litigation of the administrative procedures acts At what point do we what's the next chapter of litigation and then let's talk about what Congress might do to Get past this back and forth. So we don't just have things flip the other way around when President Bernie Sanders nationalizes Comcast Can I start by by saying the obvious and challenging your premise which is like these rules have not gone away yet and we are hearing from Members of Congress across the political spectrum that calls are going in in exceptionally high volumes even with the tax reform and very important Additional issue that was happening last week. There is an impact happening Throughout CC and and people are hearing directly from constituents and there is there is a lot of noise Happening right now. And so I want to you know that Of course, we are all thinking about next phases, but I just wanted to Preface this conversation with an urging to everyone in this room to Take it up to to continue to put pressure on all of the various lovers Yeah, and I don't think it's we're going out on a limb by saying that the Commission will then have the responsibility to defend their terribly reasoned order and In front of a court. We it's hard to predict which court at this point in time But there is a long history here the DC circuit if it were the court that were to look at this and has a number of Decisions already where they agreed with the last FCC that the large broadband monopolies have the means and motive to discriminate and that the Commission Rightfully should be concerned about this and should address it We have a draft order that ignores evidence they're ignoring the complaints as Commissioner Tristani noted They also are ignoring evidence that we asked to be submitted into the record that points to the means and the motive That were outlined in the very large ISP mergers over the last couple of years and then You know another point to make related to the incentives and as Large broadband monopolies become more vertically integrated with content And we have a Department of Justice right now who has a complaint pending against the AT&T Time Warner merger that gets directly to the means and the motive. What does it mean when you have a large broadband provider who's a video provider that wants to merge with a content provider and the Trump DOJ is going wait a minute The last two portions of its complaint get into You know, there's an incentive for AT&T To affect online video competition and there's an incentive as AT&T and Comcast Who are the largest video providers in the United States to engage in collusion together in their oligopoly? to You know prevent online video competition from really happening. So there's that evidence too There's a lot of evidence that the current draft order is ignoring And I think a court is gonna look a scant of us, you know judges are people too Right judges have the same experiences that you and I have when we're buying ISP service and realizing like heck I don't really have a lot of choice when I want that high-speed option. I've got one and Then of course you've got all the previous decisions that have been made And we have a draft order that just like turns the reality as we all know it on its head I'm like, you know, I don't know what kind of service The other commissioners at the FCC get but it's not the same kind of service that I get And it's not the same kind of service that You know my family in Texas gets so you know, I I think it's gonna be really hard for this chairman general counsel to defend this order You asked when things will move and I keep telling reporters that this is not a mysterious process But it's not determined yet. I mean the trigger for filing a suit is when the order is published in Different places depending on what kind of order it is. So that's why we can't say yet on this date We will be in court to pass the Sarah points out of the trend of schedule my columns, you know Well, you know, I've complained to the court. We said there are people too, but they have rules And when you said that too, I was flashing back and we don't know in the CVS Yeah, we don't know which court. We don't know where to wind up their processes to get there I want to go to the legislation though, too and come at it from a slightly different angle How do you want an insert? If his legislative fix and I'll give mine. Yeah, I mean good. So we don't think Congress fix this We don't think we can get a legislative fix because we don't think we need one We think this court process will play out, but I think two things For one the notion that it has to flip back and forth in every administration is a little silly You know outside of DC. This is not a partisan issue It has become one in DC, but there's no rhyme or reason to the notion that Republicans hate These rules and and Democrats hate other things And so it has to flip back and forth if we all just came around to understanding what the evidence and the law says And the data about investment that's maybe a little more controversial But the the real politic point here too to make is not only is the political situation changing all the time We have a law that was passed on a bipartisan basis in 1996 Like the final score for the 96 telecom act was 414 to 16 In the house and 91 to 5 in the senate So imagine something getting that much support and guess what it didn't end litigation It just set off you know talk about full employment act for lawyers It set off another round of telecom litigation like you've never seen before So the notion that somehow congress can come in and write the one law that will fix all of this Is I think whatever you think about this policy Just fundamentally ignoring the fact that people will go and litigate it no matter what congress thinks it's written down and settled Um so I respectfully disagree I I think that um on my tombstone. I wanted to be um emblazoned Man lying here died trying to explain discrimination to republicans I uh I've had um as you know I've served as a as an expert in several Program carriage cases and sometimes we we get a An agreement a settlement before we get to a decision Sometimes we get decisions when we get decisions findings of discrimination by an lj Other republicans tend to tend to vote against them. In fact, they voted against them at every at every opportunity And so I I do think that respectfully matt that that every time that that a republican is going to run The fcc they're going to take away The rules as you would as you would like them And so if you don't want that To me it seems the obvious thing is to is to have congress tell the fcc that it must and I go back to the 1992 cable act these are the pro these is what created the program carriage protections that are that that survive changes in administrations Now they don't go away when a republican gets elected We we still have our forum to bring complaints against vertically integrated cable operators and just to close I was very heartened when you hear you hear chairman pie speak a lot about the threats that are posed by dominant tech platforms As being just just as severe as those posed by isps In terms of harms to innovation You know you could point to I use the google example what google does to yelp and how it can make life difficult He was complaining about twitter being mean to conservatives. I was not completely persuaded. I'm trying to rob. I'm trying to help him out Trying to help him out You think about what google is doing to yelp what you think about facebook is doing to apps There's a there's a piece by elizabeth waskin in the washington post to interview She said a dozen tech entrepreneurs Uh in silicon valley investors and said the number one threat to edge innovation is is facebook appropriating your app and so um I think it's it's a bit silly to try to get in a fight as to which presents the greater threat whether it's isps or whether it's whether it's the tech dominant tech platforms But senator franken made a speech about two weeks ago saying that it's time for for net neutrality for tech platforms And so for me that's the hook if we can get Some bipartisan consensus around the idea of creating a forum For edge providers to come whenever they feel like they've been discriminated against whether it's by isps or tech dominant tech platforms It would be a lasting solution to the net neutrality problem so You have a number of platforms right now that consumers can go to They can Go to google They can go to bean. They can go to yahoo. They can go to facebook. They can go to twitter. They can go to instagram I mean I can't just keep going and going and going What's your third of consumers right now? Have only one choice or at best Two choices for their large isp Tell me What is the threat? What's the biggest threat here? The biggest threat here is that open internet protections are going to go away And guess what's going to happen to innovation? It's just going to be up to the large isp where you get that new innovative product And they see something that they like they can insist on oh, we're going to buy that And you can't get to the customer unless you come through us. That is the real threat So let's get back. So should congress do anything? Assuming congress can pass a bill which seems to be a problem with these guys these days Should they sort of step in and take this out of aji pie's hand should we should I ask this question again in january 2019? I I always laugh when they say there's all this uncertainty that we're causing Please stop us from causing it and help us with this. I don't know. I think it puts republicans on a funny place You know, we shouldn't regulate the internet except for twitter is kind of a funny rallying cry And I think to house point. Yes platforms can be threats to innovation. I don't think that despite what senator franken said Uh that a kind of non-discrimination or common carrier regime for platforms makes sense because as horizon said Wrongly back in 2012 in the last court case. They said we're more like in newspaper at this point not a network We editorialize. Well, I don't think they do. I don't think they should be able to do that But facebook for all the problems it causes does make those kinds of choices and we can have that debate I just don't think that Facebook crosses that line at this point let alone do america's website or how's website or our website You know, those are the kind of places. I don't think anybody would say it should be subject to Fairness doctrine for the internet dare. I say it Based on the fact that every website should be treated the same as every internet connection I would point out that in the course of about five minutes here the the contours of the legislative Conversation went from it's really complicated to codify net neutrality into legislation Particularly legislation that will pass to let's put the entire eco internet ecosystem into a possible legislative package And try to go there. I think we have a lot of discrete Problems and challenges that exist on the internet today. We've talked about many of them and matt touched on some more And but we also have a very Piece of legislation then 1896 act that has actually weathered quite well. It is imperfect But it provides a very sound basis for strong net neutrality protection And so if to maps, you know to echo matt's point if we want to stop the ping-ponging that can happen Tomorrow if the commission if the chairman pulls his order And and to be clear legislation in itself is is a ping-ponging experience too The politics don't just suddenly go away because we're debating a bill instead of a regulatory policy I would say the v chip provisions of the 96 act have not really aged I've asked the questions now. It's turned for you to ask that Please make it a question not a comment a question in the form of a comment or comment We got a mic for you This is primarily i'm mike godwin. This is primarily For mr. Stani and also for mr. Wood And that's but but I think other people may have thoughts on this as well And that's the comments process in the FCC Rulemaking because I think we have seen historically in the run-up to the 2015 order We saw an unprecedented degree of public participation in contributing to comments And we saw that the comments use extensively in response to the notice of rulemaking in the current rule But in the in the intervening in the interval chairman pie in the run-up to releasing his order his notice of proposed rulemaking said We want we're only going to pay attention to substantive comments a substantive economic analysis And not we're not going to take this as like a plebiscite We're not going to interpret this as as if numbers mean anything and I wonder what the role of the comments process is in light of The commission's characterization of that process I I can't speak to what drives and motivates chairman pie But when I was a commissioner, I thought it was really important to pay attention to whether the public said good or bad Or indifferent because at the end of the day one of the fundamental responsibilities of the commission is to made as widely accessible To all of america a fast and moving and etc. Etc. Wonderful communication system It's to serve the american people and to make it universally acceptable to all I I was very concerned about chairman pie because sure they're going to be some comments that you know It's going to be if it's a comment just says I support net and trolley. I don't support it You give it some weight as It may be a little different from a very well reasoned or whatever comment But at the end of the day it is a comment from an american Constituent and it should be paid attention to you may disagree, but it should be paid attention to So to even say we're not even going to look at them Is a problem and in this particular proceeding and mac can probably speak to that much better We've had the added problem that there have been fake comments And that the commission has refused to do absolutely nothing about it or to try and ascertain what the problems are so as one of the last points I'd like to make is that This this particular order may not only have substantive issues But it has incredible procedural issues that will and could make a court pause Beyond that I won't say much except my late husband was a judge And he taught me a lot about You could never guess what judges would say, but he'd also tell me Judges are as political as anybody else in the in the good sense If I could jump in I mean I I think gloria has hit on a lot of really fundamental challenges to the Really big problems in this docket. This is not just the the chairman saying he he will Take certain types of comments less seriously than others This is a chairman in an sec who's completely ignored long Like long term issues with how comments are received has done nothing to investigate the fraudulent comments Done nothing to protect the integrity of this docket and and this you know With a sort of flippant attitude to the the process that I do say I mean yesterday Public knowledge along with 40 other public interest organizations Submitted a very reasonable request to the commission that asking them to Delay vote on the open internet order repeal order until the night circuit had concluded its review of the 18c mobility case Um Rather than simply making a decision about that his response was I thought quite flippant and crass and And inappropriate. He's he you know called people calls for public knowledge names And really was dismissive of of a very real like, you know Procedural question that had been raised and so I you know, I agree with with everything gloria said that I think that there's some Some issues here and there we there is no reason to rush this There's no reason that this has to be voted on next week And I would urge folks who are you know, maybe Might agree might fall more along the house singer spectrum of how they feel about net neutrality But also want to help protect the integrity of our democratic processes to to ask the commission to take a little more time We had a question in the front row there trying to make sure the right and the left are equally represented here Thank you very much for our next And flippant and crass seems to be the new world order that we're all learning to live with so my question is You all have a very Deep technical and policy and economic background But I sometimes think that experts often ascribe Intention on decision makers Is it possible that the decision makers in this? whole Ecosystem are simply not across the nuance technical issues and the societal impacts of their decisions Can you comment on whether the FCC? Chairman pie is sufficiently briefed on the consumer and the public interest by public interest advocates And and consumer advocates and and I mean that quite seriously and you might say hey, you're being naive Of course they of course he is but I think watching the epa clearly That that's a parallel where they simply are not across the The impacts of what they're doing the question isn't the least bit naive I think it's obvious that different members of congress have different Attitude and familiarity with technology issues and every issue I would say the way that chairman pie is different from other people that have been appointed by this administration Is he actually comes from this agency? So he was he's been a commissioner since 2012 He was in the general counsel's office the chief lawyers of the fc Pointed by president and obama who may well, yeah, but that's because yeah The statute says that only three can be from the president's party So the president appoints the other party's commissioners as well So just in a nutshell he is not an epa head who has been plucked from some other field or straight from industry And never been at the agency. This is a guy who understands the law and the facts We think we just feel like he gets them wrong About all the time lately unfortunately not just on this but on lots of things where we're fighting and we've touched on a few of them Just very briefly today But you but you had another part to your question about Well, I I I have no clue I can tell you that From talking you were a public interest organization and I work with many others and I think um We were only able to get into his office one And apparently we had offended him so now we can't see him again of He personally told me I offended him. That's a whole new story but But I don't think it matters because it was I mean I think public interest groups should be able to go into the commission and see the chairman as much as anybody else And they should do it even if they get a stone face even if you know it makes absolutely no difference because it is your right You know, why should just the telephone companies go in but um But it it again goes with the pattern of the process in this particular proceeding you at least try To pretend or at least that you are listening to all sides But when you start you're proceeding with a speech where you say this is a fight We will wage and it is a fight. We will win The die is cast but um But it's it's unfortunate and it's unfortunate that public interest groups and the public are relegated to this kind of like Maybe maybe you know compartmentalized. Maybe we don't matter. Maybe we're not important. Maybe we're just not smart Okay, we have time for one last question. If we would like priority consideration of your question, please submit your bid All right, I think you had your hand up there first in the second row Thank you. I'll make it brief. I'm adam Isgro. I'm an independent consultant Don't have a current client interest in this and full disclosure in the past I work with organizations and for organizations that were strong net neutrality advocates Um, what did the panel see the odds of a stay? By whatever court comes up with the jurisdiction over this to be and in the event that A defacto stay from congress whatever form that might take As a wrench in the works What will it take on the ground to get congress to act in that way? And i'm thinking of past fights along the lines of sopa pippa and blackouts and dare I say it throttling of congress's internet? Whatever my work I was told when I was in private practice that giving odds is malpractice So I mean stays are always complicated always hard to fight about to say today when we don't know what the fine order will say in complete Detail and what court will be in here are odds for a stay I can't even go there, but I think you know a congressional state exactly what sarah was talking about earlier If you mean before he votes we've been doing everything we can to say slow down Stop this is unwise. This is unjustified and please reconsider before we get to that point The phones are lighting up in congress, but As if rob said he probably doesn't care what people think about him I think mr. Trisani's point shows he does care what some people think about him Will he listen to the american people and two members of congress? We just don't know Anyone else offer predictions on this so yes Yes, no, want to stay I mean, this is a super complicated question and you know As parties who may or may not be the indication the litigation going forward, you know, I think that Say I mean, you know, what do we have a half a million calls basically in the week of thanksgiving not before or after thanksgiving, but that very week so They are frequent players here, and they've certainly heard from their constituents and they've heard from I'm sorry, uh, that sounds interesting. I don't I don't know that we can build that from scratch in the next week But I mean we've certainly tried to get constituent voices into these members of congress's offices Okay, we'll have to uh Leave it at that. I'll make my own prediction which will be proved true relentless litigation And we'll be back here. Exactly. We'll be back here in here. See you then. Yeah. Thank you