 I'm biased by having been interested in this subject since before the term then neutrality was introduced. So I'm biased by trying to push the question why neutrality should be the thing we care about, which is to say roughly the following story. So here's a story and the story goes roughly like this. In the first half of the 1990s there was a growing understanding that communications networks have significant demand side economies of scale. If you wanted competition that is to say network effects, if you wanted competition as we transition from incumbents everywhere, usually state incumbents in the US, the telecos, you needed to allow competitors to share their facilities. The most controversial but significant one was unbundling, that's to say allowing competitors to use the actual physical infrastructure that was hard to replicate, bringing their new physical infrastructure and connect to it because that's how you would get competition. You would get competition for people who would actually build facilities ever closer to the home so they could get redundant networks on which there would be competition. The big question was what would happen with and this was generally the model though it was a fact in the courts by the bills but the big question was what would happen with cable and around 2000 the trend was toward equalizing in the direction of open access. That is to say we had a few cable franchising authorities most famous among the Portland beginning to pass requirements in franchise agreements. You had the federal court say no you can't do that, that's up to the FCC but creating a basic condition that understands carriage aesthetic communications and then call them there's a service on to it and we needed to figure out aesthetic communications. And between November 2001 and May of 2002 roughly a series of initial decisions come out or reports come out from the FCC that begin to say no actually what we want is to shift from this idea that each pipe should be competitive and we should get multiple competitors. Oh by the way the other major thing was in the AOL time where Merger AOL was required to offer access to at least three other competitors in various cities. Again on the model of beginning to move toward open access which was a cable bridge. During that period suddenly the shift conceptually was from competition on each wire the competition between these two wires. The notion that duopoly competition was the model and moving away from open access. That's I think when once people pretty much gave us the idea of actual physical competition by connecting and being able to lease certain network elements as necessary and connecting on the line side for the close to the home and replicating the most expensive components and bringing in the best electronics close to the home and actually allowing competition. It's when the fallback was to basically we're not going to have competition on any wire. We're just going to have these two that net neutrality became the idea okay we're not going to have competition on each wire but let's at least assure a neutral stance by the owner of the infrastructure vis-a-vis the competition. And my basic question when I want to open the conversation I'll be curious to hear why you think it's a good idea or a bad idea as not in your initial comments that later on but also around the room is there are many policies that were passed between January of 2001 and January of 2008 that will need to be revised. There is much disagreement about many of these policies. What isn't about this policy that doesn't allow us to go back and ask why can't we have actual competition in physical infrastructure as one main model and to do that like many other places in the world you may need to require the owner of the infrastructure to open it up to a great extent to competitors not just in content but actually allowing people to these components and get in there and begin to open on funding again. Question one. Question two. Do we need an alternative work around infrastructure that is public? Municipal broadband be it fiber to the home be it fiber wireless. Three should we be focusing on user-owned infrastructure that is to say either wire the smash by changing spectrum policy to allow people to buy a device, start it up and then create their own local loop which then anybody else can come and connect internet to it or some combination of company and fiber where people buy their own fiber the way they buy their own water lines connecting to a public main that runs in the main or to a competitive main the imagination moving beyond regulation at the margins of what the monopolist owner of the pipe is toward a set of policy interventions that will mean that there will be multiple pipe plants some private some public and that the discipline will come from the possibility of competition between these genuine physical facilities that's my question right okay hi my name is Tim will I'm a sort of I forced my way on to the panel and ask me somebody asking me interesting questions I'm tempted to abandon what I was gonna talk about I want to say first of all I it's great to be back at Berkman Center I was actually an alumni I was a student here when it sounded and I don't I was an RA for this strange new professor named Larry Lessick who was you know kind of this kooky character and the Berkman Center was like three people and it's really amazing what it is now and I want to say this field I'm incredibly you know my own work this bill does come after your high and David Eisenberg who's sitting here and Larry and all these other people who got this way before me what I thought I'd do is I just want to talk about sort of where I think this issue is exactly right now and where what's going to happen this year what it and just put that out for there sort of a snapshot and where I think that neutrality is right now and I want to talk about four things four issues which I think are at the front of just say so I think there's four I want to talk about what I think is the four questions that are the defining questions of network neutrality right now or you can say internet regulation the first is this question of payments and whether or not various providers are going to be able to demand payments for delivering access to their customers so right now the way the internet works and the way we've always assumed it is you sort of pay money to get on the internet here I am at home I pay $40 a month AT&T then I'm on the internet these guys over here based on the end design they're called eBay they have to pay a million dollars a month to get on online but then they are then online and then we do whatever we want right that's the sort of design and the big question is whether one way of understanding the biggest human neutrality is whether or not AT&T which has this customer base of about 500 million 50 million people can demand money to reach its customers right whether I can say oh you want to reach these people well we'd like you know somewhere on the aggregate some kind of cash payment to reach our customers you can call this a lot of there's a lot of ways of describing this but I think this pricing issue is censured to a lot of what the future net neutrality debates will be over you know this is sometimes called a fast lane by its the tractors it's called a paola scheme it's called a lot of different things but then one of the huge questions at the bottom of network neutrality is whether or not you can demand that payment now this is a payment that these guys and the camel industry are very accustomed to get when you're talking about telephony this is called an access fee you know they charge people take and telephony this is called an access fee where you charge people to reach your customers long distance carriers and that's a regulated price because of the possibility of abusing this since you have remembered that what you have here is a form of monopoly you have not a real normal monopoly you have a termination monopoly that is to say if you want to reach me you have no choice but to go through 18 to you or if you want to reach 18 T's 10 million customers however many it is probably 50 million something you have to go and deal with that so they'd like to be able to charge that fee what net neutrality advocates and if you're a cable company you're also used to this in the sense that you know you're used to the idea that people want to reach if content providers want to reach your customers they gotta you know they have to work through you and that that's basically what this this fee is all about so one of the big questions whether or not this fee will be charged and most of the network neutrality proposals that are in legislation have some kind of rule saying this fee can't be charged so that's what I think is the first question that's in debate right now the second is this issue which has been highlighted by Comcast this question of what is reasonable network management when can the carrier delay or or block or somehow mess with a connection between two parties on the internet in the purposes of managing bandwidth and this I think is evolving towards this is my read of the hearing that was here at Harvard I think it's evolving towards something where unilateral approaches are not accepted and if you take an approach to network management it must be multilateral or it must involve all of the relevant players on the internet the one thing I was very struck by here at the panel that was an FCC hearing was this sense that what the people who are designers the internet object to the most is a carrier single-handedly deciding that they're going to manage them you know manage traffic from this point in the network as opposed to involving everybody who has this problem of traffic working together you know so unilateral solutions I imagine the future will be unallowed but with possibility of multilateral solutions being acceptable which is sort of the way the internet's always work the third issue that I think is the issue right now is you know if there is some kind of floating net neutrality norm that is sometimes enforced by the FCC what is the form of the scheme going to take this something you'll find I were just sort of talking about is it just going to be an ad hoc if the FCC sees something it doesn't like it does something about it kind of system my guess is you know the next administration may be different but my guess is we are laying the groundwork right now for exactly that system for better or for worse that is something where net neutrality sort of remains this concept that floats out there that you're not supposed to transgress and when you do you get to find what exactly the rule is is defined in a somewhat vague way and you have something like a common law development of what are acceptable and unacceptable practices by network carriers that's what things seem to be going in the current time as far as I can tell we can have a debate whether that's a good administrative structure or not but my sense is that's where the things are going where most of the regulation is by hearings by sort of ad hoc orders and by regulatory threat as opposed to rules process and those kind of things this is where I feel that this is going I think there's some reasons to defend that approach it's faster it doesn't obviously it has if you're a person of sort of legal process you may or very clear rules you may not like it but I think maybe that that direction things are going the fourth thing I want to say is the fourth question I think is really on the on the on the ground right now is or the people are thinking about actively or is out there is this holiday issue question is what does Hollywood think of network neutrality what side is the content industries on this is very sort of base political question in a lot of ways Hollywood is the same position that eBay is in in the sense that they are you know if this imagine this being a studio studio is there also this question of whether they're going to be you know they're going to make another payment to the last mile carrier or they're going to be asked for that kind of payment and the question is what do they think about that and I don't think Hollywood's made up its mind in the sense I think the content industries like they're kind of torn because on the one hand they don't want their their hesitant to get engaged with another set of with a set of powerful gatekeepers like the telephone companies and so they don't like that part about it on the other hand any system where if they pay more they get advantages over other people is the traditional Hollywood way of doing business if you look at the history of the theaters and control of theaters and so I think Hollywood right now is kind of not clear there's also this copyright issue sometimes there's been a conflation of the net neutrality issue with the copyright issue and Hollywood is obvious stances about that but right now Hollywood is is divided over this issue as to whether they want to let these people have power over them or whether they think they can manipulate the situation for their advantage so this year I think there's going to be a kind of struggle in the basically policy community to get the get the allegiance of the people who own content so that's what I think net neutrality is at this exact at this exact moment so yeah so I think I can be pretty brief because your high intent pretty well covered most of things I would be inclined to say unlike them I'm the most part consumer rather than a generator of this literature but my sense is the discussion in zero could be enhanced with some more clarity concerning what our objectives are and what how the various arguments for and against that neutrality match up with them so just by way of taxonomy it seems to me there are in the literature these six different conceptions of network neutrality which the first four are the leading candidates are they're different and they're often conflated so the first one is content neutrality idea here is if you were committed to this principle you would forbid ISPs to block or slow packets on the basis of what when reassembled they say second is application neutrality this is perhaps the strongest form this is the bits are bits are bits idea each ISP must carry and relay each packet the same way the same speed the same price regardless of the purpose or function of those packets third is sender neutrality which would permit ISPs to differentiate among types of packets or purposes but must treat all senders identically so couldn't discriminate for example against other firms engaging in the same kind of service like what's over IP that they engage in fourth is the one that Tim referred to in his against second point which is the toll free idea the preservation of the custom that ISPs don't charge senders they charge recipients so there are some others but I think those are the four that are most salient in the literature and it helps to separate them out because then when you turn to the question of why we should or should not allow discrimination the different arguments have different degrees of force depending upon which definition of network neutrality you pick so the advocates of allowing discrimination on the part of the ISPs make as their principal claims that discrimination in general is efficient that the market should be making decisions about the speed and allocation of transmissions over the Internet that the ISPs have freedom of speech rights of their own they make an historical argument about the absence of neutrality and occasionally a moral argument here the advocates of network neutrality by contrast emphasize the capacity of ISPs in the current market to leverage local monopoly power into control of other markets which goes returns directly to your highest point this that assumes a baseline that is potentially up for grabs that we need to preserve opportunities for innovation on the Internet that otherwise major content providers will cut deals with ISPs that will solidify their oligopolistic power so this presumes one of the two divides in the Hollywood debate that you were discussing and then these two arguments here much less common in the debate but they concern the preservation of opportunities for amateurism and semiotic democracy in the environment so if you put these together you get a map that looks something like this so those are the different conceptions in network neutrality and here are the arguments for allowing discrimination the efficiency argument and the market decide ones are the strongest and here the arguments against allowing discrimination where we should be worried about leveraging local monopoly power that's especially salient in the context of application neutrality we want to preserve innovation on the Internet we want to avoid solidifying the position of the majors oligopolistic strategies and thereby curbing amateur behavior and we're worried about the culture of amateurism and the threat that discrimination poses to it so they map differently these different arguments and one way of responding to this is to differentiate zones in which we'd want per se rules and so on so which one rules of reason so in particular it seems that there's very few arguments in favor of allowing discrimination on the basis of content the argument in favor of network neutrality here is extremely strong here it's not quite so overwhelming but pretty strong to disallow discrimination on the basis of sender and the argument in favor of the toll free principles also pretty strong the area in which the arguments are are most sharply opposed is concerned application neutrality this is a zone in which content traffic shaping management most often arises and so if you are going to have a rule of reason in any context it would seem to be here alright so that's a quick suggestion of some typology and we should now open for discussion we have to do thanks Terry Tim I just I actually have yet another argument for network neutrality and sort of I think the etiology of the whole thing is based on the possibility that the network infrastructure could become so abundant that the telephone companies would have nothing to sell and that they're struggling to lock down their position and that they've largely succeeded and the network neutrality debate is a rear guard action against that so I just want to so that's my comment about your talk Terry I'd like to point out that Tim and Yochai are operating through to are seeing the world through two very different frames Tim's frame is how do we manage scarcity that's the telco frame Tim's taking a decidedly independent look through that frame but nonetheless that's the old frame Yochai admits of a new world where there could be radical this radical abundance that I posit and so I just simply want to point out that when we think of network neutrality let's think in terms of how the argument is framed is it frame in terms of managing scarcity if so it's all about how the telephone companies can sell what they currently have if it's in terms of radical abundance we're talking about a new world with new institutions I have it I I'm admittedly a novice but I think or I want to test out this theory that the question of net neutrality arises entirely from the fact that our little guy on the left has one choice right in other words if our little guy on the left or the audience could choose from AT&T and also a variety of other providers then it's not really an issue anymore like it's sort of like the grocery stores where I could go to a large chain grocery store and that would be analogous to the ISP that offers that treats every packet equally although some things are slow although connections are slower to my favorite sites or I could go to the specialty store that allows that only provides certain sites but provides them faster in other words I need to I need to understand is that true is net neutrality arising entirely from the fact that there's just our little guy on the left can have a choice I guess I can answer that are we answering or just yeah I think it's mostly based on that yeah but that's not a trivial thing it's been people have been trying to overcome I think the answer for cultures yes but I in my opinion and David and you'll have made me disagree that you know that last mile has been an enormous challenge an enormous problem that isn't sort of well why don't we just have 10 I mean I think we spent the last 10 years for example Michael Powell when he was a chair said we're gonna have five we're gonna have six last mile ISPs there's been all kind you know sorts of efforts to take on that problem of having more providers in the last mile some of them may have been disingenious but I think there is something there is some difficult economics in that area maybe people will disagree with me that that area at times there's a word that people use it's just sort of a verboten word there is a certain aspects of a natural monopoly to that last mile that have made it very difficult to overcome that problem of having that market look like the market for candy bars you know when I was in the industry that in the late 90s there were all kinds of companies who made their business saying well we're gonna solve the last mile problem some of them were gonna do it with laser beams some of them really had that idea of crawling through the sewer pipes and putting fiber optics in people's toilets there were a lot of companies that really said we're gonna solve this problem and there's gonna be a choice between ten different pipes into your home broadband over power lines every one of those companies almost every one of those companies is dead and we're down to two now David Eisenberg calls accepting the economics of scarcity and I'm sensitive to that I don't think we should surrender at that point but I also think that I would guess for the foreseeable future the next ten five years ten years we are looking at a monopoly a duopoly or a monopoly in that area and my question is what do we do about that I think both of these comments and question are closely connected to each other there are different versions of this core basic question that we need to in some senses know as a matter of fact I want to push back a little bit on the idea that in the last ten years what we've been trying to do is solve the last mile problem I think in the last seven years we and when I say we I mean the official federal the official arms of the federal government intended to do this have been assiduously trying to prevent competition they've been assiduously pushing toward a two pipe do awfully they've been backing off what was understood quite widely I think in the transition to require certain regulations that would allow competition when we got the spectrum task force report in 2002 that told us of the possibilities of spectrum we didn't actually move forward we still don't have white spaces 700 megahertz was auctioned for a bowl of red potage instead of actually a possibility of a genuine open out-of-the-box user owned mesh all of things were ideas that were there five seven ten years ago not ten but eight years ago so I don't think we've been trying what we've been trying to do is make sure that not too much changes and that's what I think we need now to push back on politically right but but let's let the there's one over here and one over there and then route them as they go there's when you're done can you route over there when you're done route next to you so I'm definitely not but it was really useful this look at the different facets of net neutrality which is generally just a single rubric and I wanted to suggest another argument actually against application neutrality not so much because I'm an advocate of not having application neutrality but just as something I think to consider with respect to Jonathan Zittrain's pointing out to us the sort of inherent fragility of the internet it's clear that under times of stress some messages need priority messages for first responders messages that are in some way or another related to safety or national security and clearly those applications need priority so some sort of an application priority infrastructure needs to be in place and that I think has a has the effect of making other use of that framework more likely yeah can I address that question there's this I appreciate the question there has always been you know I'm in a lot of arguments with telcos where I'm very rarely accused of being on the telcos side rather accused of being a communist and early and one of the arguments that is often brought up as the one you're you're talking about about first responders and I think it's a very straightforward answer for that and this is something I've always understood is we need to understand that there is a value to discrimination and I think that was highlighted by what Terry is talking about but that you know there's all kinds of discrimination that goes on all the time in society that's useful you hire somebody they need to be good at their job and so on so forth but there's also an enormous value of non-discriminatory networks as well and so the answer for all this first responder stuff and you know what about telemedicine is those should be on private networks you know there's such a thing as private networks that are specifically designed for a specific purpose like you know and the idea that you should have people doing surgery on the public internet is just crazy you know that there's idea well Howard doctors can be able to do surgery over the public internet you're like they shouldn't do surgery they should duplicate the infrastructure to reach around no you just you set up I mean when I was they already sell these things all over the place here in the industry they're called virtual private networks are actually private networks and you buy a reserved amount of interest you buy a reserve amount of bandwidth and it happens all the time it's happening as we speak these are very common plans and there's no reason that stuff should be on the public the public internet should be kept a public place with us where it's free from discrimination as possible and this is what we have in regular society too we have regular roads which are public but we don't you know that we when we when possible something is really needs a certain amount of priority we put on a completely different kind of way yeah so 9-1-1 over voice over a separate separate I didn't quite put it that way I'm just saying that when you are I mean some of these privacy some of the private networks can be virtually private but I think the rule is that the way the rules is and should be or the is developing is if you're going to access the public internet as defined by the publicly defined internet addresses you don't discriminate and if you're going to set up a private network with private addressing and private prioritization that's fine we have those all over the place I mean the cable network is a discriminatory network running on the same infrastructure as the internet and we're okay with that right if you think about the let me just repeat that to make it clear the collapse of cable between your house and the cable plant has two networks on it one is the public internet more or less non-discriminatory one is a highly discriminatory paid for network called the cable network they more or less coexist fine and the problem is the standards of that private network creeping on to the public network so that's what I'm trying to fend and I'm saying if you want a national security network or a national why run on the public internet that's crazy you know create a create a separate you know reserve some bandwidth on all this physical infrastructure and devote that to these places that you want to have like a 9-1-1 system again you don't need a separate wire but you reserve some of that wire for that purposes just don't contaminate the public internet with these arguments before we move on with with more questions I want to try to tease out a little bit Terry your Mac which is which is new and I think very productive but I want to push on one I think driving hypothesis of the last version of it of the last slide which is that the decisions are driven by reason rather than politics in particular the tension between what Tim identified as a core quest the first question the payments question and your reason statement for why it is that there's a strong case for a rule-based requirement on the toll-free side and so how do you see the to what extent do you see the tension between how much neutrality is a politics driven as opposed to a policy driven issue versus its susceptibility to a reason-based solution can you pass this line I feel like we're splitting a cup of wine we're sharing nicely I can be very good because I have almost nothing to say in that front I my sense is that a necessary but far from sufficient contribution in this area is sorting out the arguments analytically more clearly and that they get seized and tangled up in the political process I have no capacity to affect that I suppose there there does arise a strategic issue here that we have discussed in a mostly really context of intellectual property namely give them a ninch they'll take a mile don't concede any benefit to any forms of discrimination because it will just be misused by by by opponents that's definitely the hazard here but I my only hope here is to contribute at the academic level and to bring at the political level I just no aspirations at all that was someone over there I have a just a quick question in terms of we're talking a lot about the policy level in terms of the network neutrality versus discrimination have there been any studies in terms of the end cost of the consumer of network neutrality versus discrimination in terms of how the consumer will pay from any other studies I think the brief answer is no there aren't that many working examples of competing systems like that I can report you what the arguments are what are the arguments and I'll go back to this diagram over here so this is too close one of the arguments that's often made in this debate is that well the reason you gotta allow payments the reason that it this is you know sometimes I'll say well eBay or Google there they're free writing on the internet for free right they're using our pipes for free and we ain't going to let them do that and that's the argument that there this payment should be made this payment here there should be a payment made from the companies like eBay or Google that are on the internet over here so that the theory they might be able to lower this price here right so they can say you know if the real price is 40 then maybe they can reduce it to $20 a month right and then reduce it to $20 a month so then the consumer in theory pays less that extra $20 a month is then somehow recovered over here in higher fees paid by eBay or or Google doing more advertising you see there the big fight one of the big fights about here is who's going to pay really it's who's going to pay this cost I guess one of the biggest fights who is going to pay this and is it going to be paid directly or can they sort of make this look cheaper maybe more people will buy it and then throw those costs over here now to my mind the big threat of that and maybe you'll have to jump in here but the big threat of that is to the to amateurism right because or to you know for low cost because right now as we all know for if you're over here and you have just a tiny website you can get on this side for for $40 whatever and say something but if it becomes something where you really have to contribute or make a big contribution to that last mile pipe before you kind of get hurt then that is the real threat to to amateurism so just a very complicated way of saying that that these transfer payments to my mind and they look like kind of a very arcane or or you know inside baseball kind of thing that they are the threat to the nature of the internet because right now the whole we off the initial say oh we're just subsidizing all these companies right we're subsidizing this whole structure subsidizing eBay subsidizing Google they are making all that money and having fun and we're suffering but well if it is I don't know what you call a subsidy but there's a subsidy that's why we have Wikipedia that's why we have blogs that's why it says internalism it's because you can just have this at all without having to make that big payment do you want to know David you had data you said it's good you just want to it's your question but David seems to have data on this question I don't have data I'm sorry I'm sorry I but I do have a one quick point about the costs to consumers it's impossible to know what we don't have so the claim is that the internet is as as a neutral space has been a great feature for innovation we don't know what's coming tomorrow but and so we don't know how to measure the loss to our children and our grandchildren similarly we don't know how bad it's going to be when you know if hypothetically the incumbents really start uh discriminating and censoring and all the kinds of bad stuff we anticipate so I think inherently it's impossible to do those studies about what it will cost the consumer there is an element of belief here the this there is a question so I think there's some confusion that happens there's some confusion that sometimes happens in the gray zone between teres categories of content neutrality and application neutrality and perhaps that was part of what uh general team were were sort of going backwards and forwards about which is that you can just discriminate against not an application per se but against certain characteristics of an application if it generates a huge amount of traffic over a sustained period of time if it has a demand for low latency and reliably low latency traffic those are characteristics that are often highly correlated with one application or another maybe not entirely uh but uh you can discriminate on those kinds of grounds uh but still be neutral with respect to application and with respect to to content in some senses right uh and so it's important perhaps to remember that point and to emphasize it in these arguments that you know we can have a a neutral market where you buy a certain amount of bandwidth and a certain amount of latency for your applications and if you need to do surgery you purchase a lot of bandwidth with a lot of good latency and you pay a lot of money for it uh and so getting towards that point where you have that kind of the important neutral characteristics are teased out you sell those and whatever rate per market can get you them and then you don't discriminate against the actual application that generated a bit of a yeah that's a good point uh can i just well go ahead maybe we'll take another question fellow here nine years ago with the information infrastructure project when we were all young um a couple thoughts tim i like you all the the non-labeled three about there'll be some kind of less formal way of right of regulating this involving moral suasion and regulatory threats and other things i'm not quite sure what you're going to call that kind of melange of non-legal proposals uh and this is actually happening yeah um and i think this is how i was playing out in other countries as well um i have a fear about that and i think it's something that yokai alluded to as well which is a lot of the content which is being um filtered out safe did whatever it's being done for reasons which are nothing to do with um the kind of standard practices of regulators or telecoms regulators anyway which is that it's stuff to do with security it's stuff to expand it's stuff to national security it's various other types of filtering going on and certainly in the country's unfamiliar with you tend not to have a lot of communication between the people who do that kind of stuff which i guess here would be homeland security that area and the people doing FCC type stuff and so i can see a big kind of administrative disconnect between those two parts the other thing is that when we were talking about this in paris we talked about the fact that in europe there is supposedly competition in the last mile although it's slightly less uh grand than we meant perhaps plain it is but that may not solve all the problems for a couple of reasons first of all there's lots of content that no isp wants to carry uh because they simply just don't have a great incentive to do so and more of the point even if one word and the rest wouldn't that one helping go bankrupt quickly so something spam be it appear you can think of some combination of circumstances in which actually there'll be a lot of content that all isps would like to hand off to other people and it's not profit making for any of them so i think that there may well be a non a non competition element in which you can actually see all isps being opposed to certain types of content and sometimes there's very good reasons for that but sometimes it's just that they they prefer not to let consumers use what consumers want to use so i think that there may be problems beyond the problems that you see here which means that it won't go away just because we have competition and it and that actually the regulator is not really tooled up to deal with this at all because if they're just looking for matters to make a smoking gun they're not going to keep seeing smoking guns they're just going to see vapor and not actually understand what's going on right well it's available i'm i'm i'm there's lots of people in the room who want to talk so at my information is yeah i agree to let people so um i was a paul hofford former fellow at the berthman center uh now with no idea i'd like to uh present an argument against the part of his proposal and to uh support it with some data the particular statement that you made that seemed not right to me is equating the um activities of an internet supplier and a cable supplier i have my memory serves me you said something to the effect that both of them need to get a bandwidth and a pipe to get access to an end user and if it was not exactly that then you correct it and so uh and i was kind of troubled with that and then when terry put up his um his matrix uh i felt that that was a breadth of fresh air in understanding the comments that i'll make and so here's the data to support a different view the different view is that uh perhaps the um that there are different kinds of neutrality um among the providers and applications and those different things and if you uh posit that the value of the bandwidth is not the same then there's a lot of data to support it and the data that i would give you is that the uh ebay for example um is buying basically bits and access to bandwidth and and a channel to the end user whereas um what we most frequently call content or the kind of products that you would get them from a cable company what happens is they take the value of what that bit might be and they increase it dramatically by surrounding it with uh programs and things of that nature with certain kind of content and the evidence that it becomes more valuable is that they sell it to advertisers at much higher rates than advertisers would pay if the bandwidth wasn't surrounded by the particular kind that's the nub of what i'm saying so to equate the cable company and what they're doing to the telephone company or to the ebay company and saying that really they're both doing the same thing they're taking a kind of a commodity of value of bits and access to users is to i think really neglect some of the fine grain that happens when you look at the different kinds of neutrality and the different kinds of issues that are there does that make sense to anybody um well uh two options one i was actually thinking of doing a lightning round rather than responding directly i but i will say one thing just because you're you're suggesting it as an alternative model if i understand you correctly um you're saying cable is different from the internet and i think that was the point that he was saying don't let one bleed into the other if you're doing internet you're doing a certain kind of relationship to information that allows lots of different people to exchange lots of different information with a certain kind of architecture and a certain set of degrees of freedom and where they're distributed and if you're doing cable you're doing a very different operation that you say is wrapped in value and is valued in a certain way and that has a certain price that's attached to it and those are two such fundamentally different projects that they need to be kept separate and the concern is when the model from the one bleeds over to the other to the point that it will swamp it this i think underlines this concern okay so just just maybe to clarify i was using cable as an example that perhaps a bit isn't the bit and that the idea that everything is all people might not be uh it is maybe too simplistic but the idea is that when you build a system where you treat a bit as a bit as a bit you get a different cluster of knowledge structures and cultural structures developing in a different organizational model than when you self consciously pre-build a system to separate out these different kinds of contents and give privilege to some as opposed to others that's the knob of it for me you know let's move it to the back there i'm gonna try to drop it this is i really like the framework you played it there's him oh my name's susie lindsay i'm a former fellow at the brevin center um the starting with number three if you were to take sort of what i see as a case by case approach and end up with isolated questions going forward um and the question of what's reasonable and what is good discrimination and bad discrimination um i i currently work for a large isp that is traffic shaping and the argument they make is that a peer-to-peer network uh or peer-to-peer trafficking needs to be shaped so that they can they can service all the rest of their customers and um that would they would describe as good discrimination and i'm wondering um what the harm to the users and the peer-to-peer systems are in terms of what the if there's a corresponding bad discrimination right first of all i do this is really responding it's nice to see again and also chris's point about how this is developing i i think just descriptively that i'm gonna repeat what i said that i think this is developing in kind of a case by case almost common law method where you know isps are doing certain things and people are trying to figure out whether they think that's troublesome or not and the two things that seem to me sort of the polls on which people are are relying on is first of all to what degree and i said this earlier is the traffic management in question something that is really done in a good faith's multilateral way that is to say it's it's something that is not the one of the big problems with Comcast is basically they were throwing all the burden of bin torn onto other service providers and they were doing it secretly right everyone does everyone agrees that that peer-to-peer systems create a lot of bandwidth a lot of traffic demands as so that that's one that's sort of done in an open and multilateral fashion and then the other question and i think this is really important important is that you avoid the problem of application discrimination and in this i mean something slightly different than what terry meant by this i mean that you don't to the extent possible are not trying to pick and choose what are the winner technologies of the future of the internet you know you could have done this 20 years ago and said well you know email and is really it and go for these are really the apps that people care about on the internet and you could have sort of said we're going to prioritize everything so these work really well email go for no one wants anything else and it's really hard to predict what people are going to want you know the internet keeps developing unusual things or going in different directions that are a little unexpected and so the danger of any sort of throttling program especially when it becomes less of a throttle and more of a block is that you're sort of choosing you know you're basically advantaging client server models over p2p models so that is what i think is the sensitive issue is when you start having these particular players in a sense deciding what the winner applications are and that's what i'm concerned about but when it's done in good faith you know and everyone is trying to figure out well what do we do with this problem of excessive bandwidth use that that seems to me to be fun yeah okay right yeah that's true that's true yeah that's true last question jscoke former berkman intern um i guess so i think everyone was going to agree that there are positive and negative aspects of discrimination um and that's we're hoping the network the less discrimination the more technological innovation uh that can be uh allowed for i guess when we start to think about positive things that come out of discrimination like the possibility of smart networks that allow for things like a tracking of content for the purposes of micropayments and technology is that could allow for alternative means of compensation and incentivizing for creators and content providers whatever i find ourselves placed in a situation where on the side of increased neutrality we can preserve technological innovation but i guess uh inadvertently stymied policy innovation in terms of how we deal with um intellectual property i guess you extend this so it's maybe i probably know i'm intensely concerned with development of alternative compensation systems figuring out ways of facilitating the distribution of digital media so as to provide effective compensation to the creators without sacrificing all the benefits of the digital networks we built up so i'm i begin with the presumption of strong sensitivity to this issue on the other hand the litany of problems that are associated with affording opportunities for discrimination of the sort listed on the right hand side of the chart leads me to be inclined to give up the potential of using um discrimination except in the application area as a vehicle for achieving compensation my willingness to do that i suppose is enhanced by my view that there are other ways of achieving an alternative compensation regime including um monitoring with appropriate protections of anonymity and privacy what goes on on individual computers leaving the pipes free as a result so uh i i share the premise but i think it's not worth the risk i want to take this opportunity to answer the question that he'll have asked me in the first place which is what about open access um the old word i i i would use this term to the that what happened to the focus on trying to encourage the number of competitors in the last mile and why did we give up on this and should the focus be going back to that goal of trying to um this is an accurate characterization of what you're saying that you know should the focus be on how can the federal government or other entities academics push for just an explosion of of competitors into the last mile and i i guess i it's true i think there is to you know be completely honest i think there is a little divide and i think that's right a little divide between yo hi and i and maybe others in this debate and the reason i have been less focused on the issue of of that of trying to increase the number of competitors in the last mile is i think the following um first of all i there's a comment that chris made which is there's a problem of it not necessarily being sufficient to solve the problems of discrimination you know any discrimination problem there's two solutions one is something um richard epstein actually says a lot which is one solution is to have an anti-discrimination rule and another is to have more competition so richard epstein in employment says well you don't need title seven because you just need a lot of competition and then discrimination against blacks will go away you know and i don't think that i think that's a i don't think that i don't think it's true in employment and i also don't think it's true in the network neutrality context that is to say even if you have a lot of competition as as chris pointed out earlier i think you might still have unified discrimination for either irrational or irrational reasons that's none of us bad so that's one reason otherwise i think that the unbundled network elements approach you know i think it borrows from this sort of 70s um uh chicago school thinking which had a certain strand of chicago school thinking which had an almost mythological faith in in competitions ability to solve all problems i i feel this when i go and i hang out with the sort of the old economists and they're saying we need to introduce competition introduce competition even when it's not a likely area that there will be competition there so maybe i am slightly more accepting and and i'm willing to accept criticism on this basis of the idea that there are more and i said this earlier but natural monopoly aspects to some part of this market then we're willing to to accept and you know how i could say well that's because the government has accepted a death of competition this area and hasn't prompted new areas but i think at least for some of it i don't know about wireless but on wireline i don't know whether even if you push everything you can to try and have there be five different wires into the home each of which is whether that's sustainable or whether they will you know tend towards a one or two wires um maybe that's giving up the fight too easily and i accept that criticism but i think that that is where my intuitions lie and that the effort to try and introduce competition um may not be uh as solve all the problems we hope it might yeah oh let me say one last thing the other thing i think there's a lot more political or popular valence to the idea of net neutrality than there ever was unbundled network elements in other words people will damage you know people there's a popular movement behind net neutrality and the idea of saving the internet which never seemed to attract quite as well the idea of select UNEP or UNDPL for reasons that now maybe there was i don't know maybe i'm speaking maybe there was hard to get network neutrality movement going we didn't understand the threat and back in the unbundled network elements days right well it could be it just right it just seems to seem more like a measure that's designed to help a certain brand of competitors more than a measure designed to um sort of save something that everyone values so i think that's another issue well we need to give people a breather of a few minutes before the next set of uh uh panels uh starts um just the second time in a month that somebody says that i'm like chicago school uh still five seven ten words one if in fact there is no competition that's fine common carrier work that's what started out with right dial tone isp it was common carriage regulation it's this mockery of supposedly having a market but carefully regulating it to assure that it's a duopoly that's creating the problem so either market or non-market not a little bit of market just enough to make a lot of money without giving actual competition second it's also 10 years since i first wrote about spectrum comments right and the core claim there was ultimately the only resource we had that was owned by no one and could be the basis for a user owned network that is owned by no one shared by everyone and biased in favor of none is feasible we just haven't built it yet right stick to think about um uh soon more uh panels thank you