 Welcome back. You can say welcome back to me. This is my first time back in the studio for a couple of weeks. I've had some other commitments at University of Hawaii. And now I am back with you. My name is Dave Stevens. I'm the host of the Cyber Underground. Glad to be back here with you. We were just discussing what a happy time of year this should be. Yet every time we're on the air, we seem to be the bad news show. With me to help me out today is Hal, the network guy. Hal Kolker and professor of IT at Capulani Community College. Welcome back. Thanks for having me back. Thanks for joining me. Do we have a topic today? You just want to go back and forth. I think something seems to be important to happen. What happened in the last... I don't remember what it was. Oh yeah, that's right. Someone released the Kraken. Yes. So net neutrality has been taken off the table. So let's discuss a little bit of the history of net neutrality. So ISPs have been able to run rampant since their inception all the way up until about 2015. And then there was a court battle over the... Let's see. This is Tom Wheelman, former chair of the SEC, decided that he'd like to see the ISPs run like major utilities or telecoms, where there's limits on what they can restrict and not restrict. And there's... You got to have fairness across the board. So if I'm the water company and I don't like you, I can't shut off your water. I still got to supply you with water, right? So they wanted to supply you with water or telecommunication services. So you're like Ma Belle or the phone company. Well, that was a big battle. It got fought out and in the Obama era it got finalized. It went to the U.S. District Court of Appeals in District of Columbia, so Washington, D.C. and the fighting. If you guys want to look it up on the internet, this is... The fighting was 15-1063. You can look that up in the U.S. You can see the actual findings of the Court of Appeals. It's a little boring. It's kind of dry reading, but it's great for getting to sleep. I found, you know, a little scotch, read the Court of Appeals thing, out like a light. So anyway, that allowed net neutrality across the board. And this has been an ongoing fight. I guess they've been fighting this for a decade, going back and forth. And every time we change to a new administration, a new political party comes into power, this swings back, the pendulum swings back the other way, and yesterday it swung back. So Ajit Pai is our new FCC chairman, and he was actually on the board that voted on this in 2015, and he voted against it. And our new administration kind of likes that behavior and said, wow, you don't like the FCC, so we're going to put you in charge of it. Like Rick Perry's in charge of the organization that no one can remember. What is that organization's name? There was three departments he wanted to get rid of, but he's in charge of, oh yeah, Department of Energy. That's the one. That's the one. Now he's in charge of that one, right? And that Pruitt is in charge of the EPA, the guy who sued the EPA most time. So of course Ajit Pai is in charge of the FCC now, and he really rammed this vote down everybody's throat, but most of the panel's Republican anyway, so they voted for deregulation or taking away net neutrality rules. So let's discuss what happens now. I mean, everybody's been talking about the Boogeyman, net neutrality's been taken away now, and I'd like to be fair and present both sides of the argument. So I'll try my best to represent Ajit Pai and the Republican Party in business interest. You be the other side. You tell me what's this going to damage in America? So let's start by going back even further than you did. Okay. Because the internet started out as the ARPANET, and it was it was built, you know, of research and government. All right. DARPA, so Defense Advanced Research Project Association, right? The internet was essentially built primarily with taxpayer money, and that's part of the justification for saying, well, this should be a fair and open landscape, right? It shouldn't belong to ISPs, which is coming because this was built by the government primarily with taxpayer money. That's right. The original infrastructure was built with taxpayer dollars in a military kind of environment, right? That can make me basis. Because if the ISPs had built this network, then it would be a lot easier for them to say, well, we built it, we own it, we want to control it. Right. But that's not the case. They just kind of they just kind of run it and manage it, but they didn't actually create it. No, they upgraded it, though. They've put money into it since then. Oh, certainly. So they made an investment. But it came from originally, you know, from taxpayer money. That's why people like Tim Berners-Lee, who was one of the creators of World Wide Web, has been promoting net neutrality because, probably because of this, because he was back in that era when DARPA was doing this project, and then it got used by universities next, yes. It was used a lot for research, research universities. And so it was always kept as just an open, you know, everyone gets the same access to it. It's completely open and fair and no favoritism toward commercial activities versus other types of activities. And that's what these laws had were created to do. And so now without these laws now, pretty much the ISPs can do almost anything they want with the network that they control in. And analogy might be, you know, like the freeway on H1. Everyone has free and equal access to get into the left lane if that's moving faster. So what if instead of that, they now said, oh, well, you have to pay extra now if you want to get in the left lane. If you're just going to pay the standard rate, you're going to stay and go slow in the right lane. That's essentially what the internet could end up being now because they can charge you for different types of content. They can charge you for faster delivery of content. They can protect their own content and get it to load faster than someone else's content so that you're more likely to use their product than someone else's. So there's a whole lot they can do now to, almost all these ISPs are now also in the content and media business. They're not just providing internet access. They provide the news and the services and the streaming media. News, streaming, media, television. So they have a vested interest in providing their content over others. It would profit them. Yeah. So let's say that your ISP is affiliated with Netflix. They could make Netflix run faster than who, so that you're more likely to sign up with them. Sign up with Netflix because you're going to get faster service from Netflix and you're going to get from other people. So swing that pendulum back the other way. Your example of the freeway access where you have to pay for more for the fast lane. I used to live in California and that exists. You can get a toll road and there's a fast pass you can get to use that left lane at certain hours of the day. I'm not really sure if that's effective. I've never seen any studies of saying that's effective or not effective. But again, it's not run privately. That is a public service and the government is recouping some of the development costs by saying you can use this fast lane if you pay more money. We built you a toll road. We have to charge you a toll because it costs money and we didn't have money in the budget so we have to pay ourselves back. But ISPs have a different interest in mind. Let's go back to your example. Say we package things. One ISP packages Netflix and the Washington Post and New York Times. But another vendor might do Hulu, Sling TV and what the Los Angeles Times and Fox News. Right. But if you didn't have a choice, which vendor you'd have to choose one or the other, whatever your state is offering, I think Arizona is very limited. Someone just told us that just a few minutes ago. You just have a limited like Comcast, right? Whatever Comcast wants to feed you. And I guess the danger is, and we saw this with the 2016 election, President Trump actually admitted he didn't think he'd be president without social media. So if you can control which social media outlets are loaded faster in a browser, then you can control people's public opinions. So I think the example I was I was thinking of is say we have Facebook and another vendor that does social media and you don't like the other vendor. So you slow them down. So it takes five or six seconds for each page to load. Now we know the attention span of especially the millennials in this is very short. Click, click it. If it doesn't load right away, you're off. Right, right. So if that's not loading, you're going to go to Facebook because it loads faster. So you've essentially limited the access to the information. But not really. I mean, if you're patient, you can get that information. We all know that's not the new generation that no one's patient anymore. Not even I'm patient. I actually get upset when I'm in the drive through at McDonald's and it takes longer than five minutes. But that's ridiculous. Right. I'm thinking, well, what the heck are they doing? This is fast. That's terrible. I know I'm I've been sucked in and I'm a consumer. I totally admit it. But there's a danger, right? You could conceivably change people's opinions. Now the argument, I guess, from a business standpoint is, and this is kind of weird. I heard this argument. So we're packaging Netflix and and and Washington Post and the news media we like over here with this vendor, and we part your package Hulu and Sling TV over here with this vendor, and the consumer has to choose which one they want to go with. And the Republican Party is actually saying this is consumer choice. Well, yeah, but currently, we don't have to choose a vendor. All these are available at the same speed. It seems to me that the the the better consumer choice is when everything is out there equally, and I can choose amongst absolutely everything. But what I'm hearing is is some of the experts say that they expect now that internet is going to be sold in different packages like the way that that they do cable TV. So you won't be able to choose individual sites. You'll buy the package that has, you know, the New York Times and Netflix and all you buy the other package that has the Washington Post and Hulu. But for each package, you're going to pay more and you're not you can't, you know, select one site you're going to have to buy. Maybe you only want the one site, but you may have to buy half a dozen, right, to get that one site kind of the way that the cable TV is done now. So if you love the way that the cable TV companies do their business, you're probably going to love the new one too. There's there's another side of the story where where people theorize another eventuality where everything's still available to everybody. But that certain vendor that you can buy a package with includes Netflix and the Washington Post or New York Times, they'll let you get to those for free and it won't limit your data plan, unlike your phone or your iPad, right? But if you choose to do the New York Times or the Press Telegraph in London, those apply to your data plan and they will take off the however many megabytes you get per month. Like Hulu, you stream with Hulu instead of Netflix, you get charged where you Netflix is free. Now that's great, except now Netflix has customers that don't subscribe to that particular vendor because maybe they're not even in that area. So the package isn't available. In that case, the customers who are paying $12.99 a month for Netflix, well, Netflix is not going to have to pay that vendor more money to have their people outside of the package access Netflix. So that gets passed on to the consumer. Where is that money going to come from? They're going to charge you. They're going to charge you and I. So that's another scenario where even if the ISPs don't do this, they could throttle other vendors. And with those vendors don't want to be throttled and they want service for everybody across the board, they're going to have to pay more. And paying more means we have to pay more. Because they can't speed up the packets on the network. All they can do is slow them down. So they'll slow down certain ones and let others go through. I mean, this is what we call a networking QoS or Quality of Service. You can prioritize and give certain sites or certain types of traffic priority or higher quality of service than others. And then those will go faster and you're going to get a better experience from those sites than you would from other sites that have a lower quality. So what do we do about this? It just feels like we're along for the ride. There's nothing we can do except express our opinions of the next polls. Yeah, and I was one of those who went to the FCC site and I left several comments. There was a public comment period where people were world. And I heard that they got millions and millions of comments, which is unusual. There were bots, though. They said there were bots involved and several million of them were repeats or bot generated. And there was a very large number that came from Russian email addresses, I understand. Really? How is that ever possible in this country to be influenced by another country? That's never happened. My gosh. Okay, we're going to take a little break. We're going to take one minute to pay some bills and we'll be right back until then. Stay safe. My name is Howard Wigg. I am the proud host of Code Green, a program on Think Tech Hawaii. We show at three o'clock in the afternoon every other Monday. My guests are specialists both from here and the mainland on energy efficiency, which means you do more for less electricity and you're generally safer and more comfortable while you're keeping dollars in your pocket. Well, good back. It was just enough time to will not do anything. Well, I hope you enjoy our public service announcements. We're back here at the cyber underground with more good news. Merry Christmas, everybody. Net neutrality has been taken off the board. So now we're trying to figure out what the heck do we do now as consumers? And we were just talking about that. Not much we could do, but this was a, it sounds like a partisan decision down party lines. And the pendulum swung back the opposite way during the Obama administration. Now with Trump, it's it's going back. And we have, I think a duty to go out and vote. There are something called midterm elections, which are notoriously low turnout elections for Democrats. I wish that was not true. But it gives Republicans an incredible advantage. And they know it. They got it and they've used it. We should go out there and we should vote and use our voting power. I've also heard something disturbing on the radio this morning that Hawaii has probably the lowest vote turnout in the entire country. I did not know that. How could we be below Alaska? And there's got to be people out in the wilderness of Alaska that don't bother to walk into town 60 miles or so to cast their votes. They have to fly in, in their little Cessna or something. They'll come by dog sled. How can we be lower than that? We're not that remote. In fact, Honolulu is becoming quite a big city now. Progress changes everything, I guess. But it's it's strange that I think we're seeing bigger voter turnouts like the whole Roy Moore situation. And I'm hopeful that that voter turnout will happen here in another states. And maybe we can swing the pendulum back and get representatives that are more in tune with making things fair and equal for everybody, not just for the corporations. Yeah, hopefully enough of these things that are happening, like like net net net neutrality and other things that the the Trump administration and the Congress, you know, have been trying to put through that will hopefully energize people on the the other side to come and vote in those in those midterm. I think that's what happened in Alabama. I think you're right. I think so. People got energized because they were passionate about the topic, right? So we can just keep that passion going. I think we'll be in pretty good shape. Now, getting back to net neutrality, I thought of an example that that might actually be relevant and would, unfortunately, support Ajit Pai's argument that they're trying to spur innovation by making this this just change and the argument against spurring the innovation, of course, is say, and this is the example, this is so funny, I gave an interview with KITV News yesterday, a 30-minute interview, they use six seconds and this is the example I used and they took six seconds of it and put it out there with absolutely no context on either side of it and it just hung out there and I sounded like a complete moron in my opinion. Here's the example I used. So if you took the same situation we have now and say ISPs didn't want to be very friendly and there was no net neutrality rules and you swung back time to say 1989, the only big vendor on the market was AOL. Now they did try to crush other people and it was hard for other vendors to sneak in there like Earthling did after a while but then you swing forward a little bit further. Yahoo came out. So AOL, being the big boy in the block, could have theoretically prevented Yahoo from becoming the major search engine it was back then. Yahoo in turn in five years became a huge player in the market. They were charging for the rotating banner ads on their homepage. I think they charged $20,000 per view and they did that three times a minute every minute of the day just for that one banner on their homepage. I mean they were making some serious coin but then 1999 Google came up. So how was Google supposed to grow if ISPs could say we like Yahoo but every time you go to Google we're going to slow you down. So yeah Google wouldn't have been that popular except that it actually was a search engine that didn't suck which was their original business plan which I liked. So now we're all dependent on Google. So new search engines you'll notice don't really come out anymore. Well it's been a while. It's been quite a while so these net neutrality rules might have actually helped. So say you and I created an app and it depended heavily on Google's mapping services. It was some kind of thing that linked to Google Maps. So every time someone made a request it had to link to Google Maps and get some information back. So there's some internet activity going on there but what if I don't know Google came out with that same thing or Yahoo came out with that same thing or MapQuest came out with the same app. They didn't want us to compete with them so they made a deal with the ISP. Hey every time someone make these requests from this app slow down that traffic. Right. If I'm hailing an Uber and it takes me five minutes but I hail a lift and it takes me 15 seconds. I'm a lift customer. Where are you going to go to? Yeah where are you going to go. Especially when you know hey I got to get there right now. I had I have to be at that bar right this minute. You know I'm going to you know go with the fastest vendor right. I mean that'd be the fanciest car but it was fastest internet speed. My example would be if we wanted to overcome that. What if somebody like I don't know Time Warner and Google got together as a company and said we're going to provide you all your services and connectivity to the internet and we will provide net neutrality across the board. So you sign up with us there's no restrictions to anything. Right. Then it would actually be competing and the other big vendors on the block would have to compete which would support Ajit Pai's argument that this is spurring competition in the market. And it would drive down the price a bit. So his argument would hold water. What do you think about that argument? Well clearly I'm not an expert in in in that area of how supply and demand is going to is going to work as well. In in in my opinion I think it could end up hurting the little guy who could now come on to the internet and get the same access as the big companies and the same throughput bandwidth. But now with this new rule he's going to have to compete with these big companies it's going to it's going to make it a lot more difficult. The cost of doing business right he's going to have to pay for more access and so his startup costs are going to be substantially more where it could have been a million dollars before. Now it's two million and part of that is going to be paying fees. If the ISP is even willing to give him the the same bandwidth as the big companies. If it's if it's an ISP that you know is owned by the same parent company as one of his competitors they may just refuse and say no we're not going to give you you know the top speed because we don't want you to compete with our partner here and I don't think there's anything that anybody can do about that. It's great it goes right back to our example with Uber and Lyft say Time Warner buys Uber now they own Uber they have a vested interest in you using Uber so they're going to slow Lyft down to a crawl. And there's not much and you can't do anything about it. The current rules say Lyft will die in that area period that's that's a real concern you know I think I have to present the Republican argument on this the other part of the pendulum that scenario they would say it's not likely to happen because that would be a merger against public interest so they would have to go through some kind of a merger. I would hope that that would happen through the courts I would hope so. I would certainly hope that that would happen. But we've seen some mergers that have been pretty big lately. The trend has been you know consume yeah more more more. Yeah it's all of these mergers and as we said earlier that the ISPs have been merging with these content and media companies. Yeah so not only they can control the content they now control delivery of that content. Right. And so that's all for the power. So in a few areas if you only had one various stuff let's go with Arizona say they only have one vendor and let's make Comcast the evil person now right. So sorry Comcast we're just going to take on you for a minute. Arizona only has Comcast you have to sign up with Comcast now Arizona if whoever's running Comcast in Arizona says we like only our point of view so we're only going to give you faster internet access speeds to Fox News, Breitbart, RightNation.com I mean whatever supports your cause right. But if you try to say I want to see the press telegraph in London or BBC News or I want to see NPR or I want to go to Washington Post or New York Times those are all going to slow down to a crawl. Ten second load times for every page. Ninety percent of your audience right now is millennials you've just lost all of them and they're only going to be reading the content you want them to read. So you could make your state think the way you want. That's a little frightening to me. My question is I'm not sure what the answer is. We've talked about slowing down certain content. Do they even have to provide that content could they actually shut off certain sites that they don't want you to access? It's a good question I don't know I know they have to make it public. If they're doing something to alter their access or speed they have to actually inform the public. They don't have a history of actually abiding both those rules you know but that that is the rules you have to tell people what you're doing. But they've all come out with statements you know every every one of these vendors has come out with a statement saying we support net neutrality we will not throttle bandwidth we are going to be fair and honest and open about it. Well then why change the rules? Well you know I know what they're saying these are spokespeople versus what's actually happening so let's look at our own administration there's Sarah Huckabee Sanders saying everything is fine and then you look at what actually is happening and it's not actually what Sarah is saying is happening you know there's a difference right? They've spent millions and millions lobbying for this now they have to have something in mind to make some to be changing something to spend all of this money they're not going to spend it unless they've got some something on obviously. Something's on the plate. They've cut something in their mind that they they want to make some kind of a major change that they think is going to benefit them. I hope it I hope somewhere along the line someone sees a benefit and stays with that and it's not just based on just making millions of dollars for big companies. I hope that you know these statements are actually true. I think the internet I mean for so long has been like a public trust okay and now this essentially converts it into a commercial venue so we'll just have to wait and see how that affects you you know what what we're able to do on the internet and what companies are able to do and have to see how it all shakes out. Time's going to tell. Time will tell to see if our internet cable bill goes up if my Netflix subscription and gets increased. It's more money to get cable TV connection to the internet. Who knows? What else do you think we should tell the public about what you should do? Go out and vote. We're in control that way. We can swing the pendulum back the other way with our vote. And if ISPs do start to block or slow down content that you want to access absolutely you should complain. Yeah shouldn't you just accept it? Complain. Complain. To the FCC. Yeah. Why is it so much slower when I go to Netflix than it is when I go to this other site? So you're still the FCC and your provider? Yeah I don't have a lot of faith in the FCC doing much because they're kind of behind this but usually companies will listen to customer complaints if they get enough. Absolutely because they'll lose business. Try to take it seriously. It's all about the bottom line. Well more good news Merry Christmas everybody. It's always great to see you. And that's all the time we have for today. We'll see you next week. Until then stay safe.