 Google? Okay, so the news on the net neutrality front today, you heard some of it obviously in the headlines, but also Comcast CEO Brian Roberts, while trying to unveil some features that make Xfinity TV service a little more like internet TV, obviously realize that everybody wanted to hear his opinion on net neutrality. So we met it ahead on. Among the things he said was, we've had 20 years of a set of rules that have built, I think, this wonderful world that we all enjoy. I mean, that's true. It's true. Well, yeah, here's the thing. And Robert's actually trying to be positive. He's saying, I agree with all of the principles that President Obama set out. I don't think you want to do it with Title II. And that's what all of these guys are saying is you don't want to think, we don't want to do it with Title II. Problem with all of this debate is that we're debating entirely the wrong things. But Molly, I'm going to let you go first. We're going to get to that. Yeah. How are you feeling about the way this debate is going? I mean, I think it's funny because it is easy in some ways to say, look, this is exactly the same debate that it's been for the 10 years that we've been talking about it, which is can you really trust the companies that stand to make all of the money and that have arguably monopolies in some areas of this country and that have not always been good actors when it comes to their stewardship of this increasingly invaluable resource that being the Internet. So I think from that perspective, the argument really hasn't changed that much, but now it's become much more complicated because the conversation is so much about access to over-the-top video, to TV, to Netflix, to CBS services, to streaming video, to Hulu. And then it's been further confused by all these conversations about interchanges and peering connections and Netflix paying Comcasts for guaranteed service. So it's gotten more confused and weirdly more political than ever, but at the end of the day, I think it still comes down to the simple question of having a really good broadband infrastructure and whether we can trust these guys to build it without all of their sort of like commercial desires getting in the way. Right. And I even would say commercial desires are fine. In fact, commercial desires can spur innovation. That's why we have Netflix. It's not because Reed Hastings had some kind of altruistic need to make House of Cards. It's because he wanted to make a company that would make money, right? And there's no reason that ISPs shouldn't be able to make money. I think that's one of the things that ends up being a problem on these sorts of debates is that you tend to want to break it down as for the people, for the business, right? And then it doesn't need to be broken down that way. In fact, that's not the way it works best on the internet. The way that, from my understanding, transit providers and backbone providers have worked is providing business motivation to interconnection. And I think where it has really broken down, and I've said this a million times, is that the ISPs have gotten too much leverage. The bigger ISPs, the Comcast, the Time Warner's of the world have gotten too much leverage. Now, what do you think of that? I mean, if we were to say like, let's break up the ISPs, I think that'd be going too far. But how do you fix that? Yeah. I mean, the only way that you're ever going to fix that is through competition. And I think we've seen over and over that we do not have a sufficiently competitive landscape. You didn't really even see these guys starting to invest seriously in their networks until pretty recently when they started to realize that they were having significant competition pressures from wireless, from high-speed wireless, and that they couldn't deliver Netflix. I mean, crazily enough, the push to upgrade their infrastructure came from companies like Netflix and from them streaming long-form video content, which they apparently just didn't see coming. But until then, they were busy sort of like creating fiefdoms. I mean, Comcast controls a huge part of the market and is trying to buy Time Warner. Like you just don't have enough legitimate choice in this country and enough legitimate competition. And I actually don't think that wireless is true competition to wired broadband at this point. So they haven't had the right incentive to build out their broadband networks. If they do, if the free market actually worked and they had plenty of competition, then I think we would have broadband networks we'd all be pretty happy with. Right. We had lots of competition in the dial-up era. And in the dial-up era, everybody could use the phone system because it was a common carrier to run their ISP. Then DSL came along and the DSL networks were under Common Carrier, under Title II, forced to unbundle and open up their networks to competitors. What happened was they delayed that. That is when the push for classification of ISPs as information services came. And they, without using regulation, essentially put in really difficult ways of putting in DSL. I remember trying to get DSL installed in 2000 in San Francisco. It was a nightmare because they said, well, if you're using, you can't use that kind of box. You can only use this kind of box. They put in incredible amounts of roadblocks to prevent competition. And since the regulatory agencies were swinging away from Common Carrier anyway, they didn't bother to follow up and try to change the situation. So now you have a situation where the ISPs were entrenched monopolies in their beginnings, right? All of these local telcos were monopolies at one time. All of the cable companies, for the most part, were given monopoly franchises at one time. And they have benefited from that. They also benefit from local regulations. A great article on Wired where it talks about how difficult it is for anyone to come in again, the incumbent. If you try to actually roll out a new ISP, you face tons of bureaucratic nightmare. You face all kinds of local fees. You face lawsuits from the incumbent who's like, well, you're trying to use our polls. And those polls are owned by us. Most of these are frivolous and get thrown out of court, but they cost you money. You take up time and money, exactly. Yeah. So essentially, we don't have enough competition. Some people are trying to, I've got five providers. Do you have five providers that provide you 10 megabits per second or more even? Do you definitely don't have five providers that give you gigabit? Most people feel like they don't have more than two choices, and that those two choices are basically not much of a choice. In a lot of places, it's cable, faster internet versus DSL, slow internet. And that's just not a reasonable option. So in my opinion, if you look at that and you say, okay, well, what can we do for competition? There's two ways it's worked elsewhere. In Europe, they unbundled the loop. They said, look, you can't own the infrastructure and be the ISP at the same time. And that has worked. That has worked fairly well. That is not the only way to do it, though. And when we did the special this summer, we found out that in Korea, they just made it easy for people to invest and roll out infrastructure. And so they had five at one time, fiber networks in Seoul, Korea, because the government actually worked the opposite of the way local governments work here. They said, yeah, we'll make it easy for you to run infrastructure. And it's not efficient. They all have their own lines and they all have their own boxes, but they have competition. So what we did was we did the worst of both sides. We let a monopoly build up all the infrastructure with a lot of government help, sometimes subsidized funds, sometimes just easements. And then we made it really hard for anyone to come in and compete with them because the cities are broke. And they're like, well, we want our taxes. We're not going to make it easy. The incumbent telcos are like, that's right. Don't make it easy for them. Make it really hard. And nobody can break that log jam at the same time. Any kind of regulatory agency that would come in and suggest unbundling is just going to get fire bombed at the national level. Yes, they're going to get creamed. And then the results is that we're now having a conversation about reclassifying the internet as a Title II utility, which is the wrong law to apply. These are rules that were, as we've talked about, not designed for something like the internet. They're just not going to be efficient. They're not going to cover the interconnect and peering agreements that are already sort of the subject of so much controversy. And it's the wrong solution. And it is an over-regulation. I mean, I think you and I probably agree and have been saying for a decade that the worst thing that could happen was that these guys would behave in such a way and such an untrustworthy way that the government would come in and over-regulate the internet. I actually do not think that ideally we would foster enough competition, maybe through subsidies or some sort of specific incentive programs, that what we would get is faster broadband for all and that we would have like a rising tide floats all boats. I feel like there's a part of me that could be arguing for some kind of a trickle-down thing, and that makes me uncomfortable, but you know what I mean. Which is that ultimately we don't need, we don't want a bunch of government regulation that will not help the internet. It will not, I agree. Unless it is like a new law, a new set of rules that are crafted specifically for this very unique entity. And that what we really need is just faster broadband because we also don't need fast lanes if we just have faster broadband. That doesn't affect traffic shaping. Like traffic shaping and prioritizing video and prioritizing emergency channels, none of that has to be in violation of the spirit of net neutrality. It isn't, right? Net neutrality doesn't say that you have to treat every packet equally and that you have to deliver them equally. It says that you have to treat all the content equally and not favor one over the other and not charge smaller companies and essentially attacks to get on to the internet and make it prohibitive for them to do so in an unfair way. So all we want is faster broadband and then it will work fine for everybody. It will. Now a lot of people say, oh yeah, Brian Roberts was one of them. We've had 20 years of a set of rules that have built a wonderful world. The thing is, it's not a horrible world, right? And that's where the people have started to divide up into camps. You're wrong and you're wrong. It's a disaster. Well, it's not a disaster. So it's easy for the other side to say, no, it's not a disaster. We have, you know, 50 megabit per second internet available in lots of places. But there was the new America survey that came out in June that looked at all of the top 24 cities for broadband, some in the US, some not. And they determined that the United States pretty much pays more for slower internet than the rest of the world. Highest ranked city was Seoul with a private ISP. Number two are actually tied for number one, Hong Kong with a private ISP, Tokyo with a private ISP. You know who else was up there? Chattanooga with a municipal ISP, Kansas City, Google Fiber, Lafayette with a municipal ISP, then you get Zurich, then you get Bristol, Virginia with a municipal ISP. So why is it that the rest of the world, these so-called socialist countries are having private ISPs, give them the fastest broadband? We're here in the United States where we have open enterprise and we've had 20 years of wonderful rules. Only the government run stuff is giving you the good broadband at the right price. That's not right. That's not the way it's supposed to work. And then all the ISPs are going after all the municipal laws saying, well, we can't actually compete with them. So let's just pass laws to make them illegal. To make them illegal, to make municipal broadband illegal. Exactly. I mean, it's just a bizarre situation when you think about it and it is exactly what happens when you don't have competition. And so every conversation that this comes down to has to include the competition element. You have to make that a crucial part of the plan because otherwise you will just continue to regulate virtual monopolies. And I don't think that we are to the point yet where, like I said, where wireless can be considered that competition. And so to me, that's a straw man. They still charge so much for access that to use a wireless hot spot as your full-time data connection is absurd. Yeah. And you and I were talking on the phone yesterday and I don't want to try to pretend like this is a new idea. But we were both saying, really the solution is new legislation, right? Title two isn't right because it's meant for phone. And you have to forebear the crap out of it to make it even fit. Title one is also right, not right, because the internet is more than just an information service. And it's, that was not meant for the internet either. Let's actually create a title that governs internet and let's do it right. That is politically impossible right now, unfortunately. It is. I mean, I don't necessarily, I have zero faith that such a law could be written in a way that would be palatable to anybody. I guess my question is, what would that law say? I mean, so what are the parts that need to be governed? Because realistically, I can't believe I'm going to argue this, but realistically, if we had sufficient competition, would there be a need for strong net neutrality regulation? Because in a scenario where companies and consumers can choose alternatives, except then do you get like balkanized internet service where some companies say, I'm not going to be available on Comcast because they want to charge too much for a fast lane prioritization? I don't know. I mean, would it obviate the need for a net neutrality regulation if we didn't have to worry about somebody messing with packet delivery? Here's where I think the ISPs are making a good argument. They keep saying, look, there haven't been any violations. And you can argue there have in a couple of specific cases. But for the most part, there haven't been. And on the backbone side, there haven't been. There have been like nasty business negotiations recently, because the ISPs are getting more leverage than they've ever had before. But I would argue that, yes, when we've actually had competition, no one was talking about net neutrality as anything of interest. So how do you get the competition is the thing I've been struggling with? And I haven't come up with an answer until today. And I'm not saying it's the answer. But the first thing that finally I looked at and said, wait, that could work is take away all of these local rules that make it difficult to roll out. You don't even have to use subsidies. If you want openness, go open the infrastructure, open the municipalities for anyone to be able to roll out. The city votes and decides it wants to build its own great, let that city do it. If a city wants to say, you know what, we're going to really lower the the bureaucratic barriers, we're going to lower the fees, which is a kind of a subsidy, but we're going to we're going to lower the fees and we're going to make it simple. And telcos won't like this because they don't want people to come in and compete. But open the access to the ground. That is I read over and over today when I was looking through this, that is what every person who has tried to build an open free enterprise ISP has run into is permits, construction crews, restrictions on equipment, purchasing capacity from transit providers. It's it's expensive, but it doesn't all have to be expensive. And if you can make it easier, say, you know what, we're going to open our municipality for people. Google has done us a favor by showing it can happen because what they did is they said, look, we're a 500 pound gorilla. So we're going to get the municipality to give us a break. And they did it in Kansas City and they did it in Austin. What happened in Austin when they got the municipality to ease the restrictions? All of a sudden AT&T and I think it's century link started rolling out gigabit five or two. Right, absolutely. I mean, that makes perfect sense. And it reminds me of this great Ted talk I watched that was about on the topic of the city state, right? It said, like, we need to stop talking about solutions at the national or E or certainly at the but even at the national level and start talking about solution building at the sort of city state level, like cities mayors are the people who have the power to actually make change that can kind of sweep across. And so it makes a lot of sense that if you say at the smaller because what you're talking about is a version of the last mile problem. Like, you can even build a pretty fast wireless network, but you still might have a last mile concern. And so it makes perfect sense that if you're a and if you're able to ease the base to competition on a city by city basis, that you could kind of dig the ground out from under these big telcos. Yeah, literally. What do we do here? How do we? Yeah, exactly. Literally. So how do we like write this up and like make everyone do that because I'm afraid they're going to screw it up. Like I am actually now kind of weirdly now I'm worried that they're going to classify it as a title to and it's going to be like it's going to be like a mess. Well, and thing is if they classified as title to it won't be more of a mess than it is now. It'll just be a different mess in lots of different ways. It's it's not going to solve the problem at all. I don't think it's going to be a disaster though. It's just it's just more muck. And I want to get us out of the muck. Right. Exactly. Like go the Google route, right? Just come around the back side with fiber. That's the next question. That's the perfect next question is how do you open up localities so that more people can build ISPs? What do you do? You can campaign on your local level and actually have a much better chance of swaying somebody, but it's still not guaranteed. Maybe there's some kind of national legislation that would give incentives to municipalities to open up their their regulations, the beer, you know, and lower their fees kind of like the way the highway administration works. I don't know if that's a good idea. Maybe it's not. That's that's certainly the most expedient right and probably the most efficient in terms of a large scale because otherwise you'll just have those the entrenched monopolies dig in further in the places where they have all the control. Because I do think fundamentally the conversation about net neutrality comes down to trying to protect the internet from bad actors and behaviors that are so financially motivated, right? Like this is what would separate some monopoly from a good business is when the financially motivated behaviors start to be anti competitive. It's out of proportion. Yeah. It's out of proportion. Exactly. Nobody's saying that businesses shouldn't be able to make money. What we're saying is that there should be enough of you competing that we start to have that consumer, that fundamental consumer level trust that we know you're not going to try to screw us because you can't screw me because I can go to somebody else. Yeah. We do not have that on a broad scale now. And that's why we're worried about things like that's why we're worried about bad actors, bad behavior about about money grubby, basically, for lack of a and if you have sufficient competition, I think you could make an argument that you don't need net neutrality regulation. Yeah, I think you're right. I mean, I would be great. The only thing that I can think of that's an objection to this is people saying, Oh, but, you know, this is taking away the natural way business is gone. Comcast has has worked hard and invested to get where they are today. Why take that away from them? Why have the state take that away from them? And the lie is that, yeah, Comcast, AT&T, Verizon, none of them got where they are today with open competition. They all started with government intervention, giving them an advantage. Exactly. And even if that were the case, companies still become anti competitive monopolies and get in trouble for it when they overreach, see Microsoft, see the train, you know, the train companies like monopolies can still come into being. And that's why we have regulation in the first place and unregulated business, completely unregulated business hasn't always produced bad actors. Yeah. Like otherwise, we wouldn't have business regulation in the first place. So I think I think some light net neutrality guidelines are perfectly reasonable. I don't think section 706 gives you the right way to do it. I don't think title two gives you the right way to do it. But even if you can find the right way to do it there, it's not going to solve the problem. The lie that Netflix and the telcos and the ISPs want you to believe is that the government can fix this. What they want is that they continue to allow the status quo to happen so that no one can compete with them because they have these natural advantages that are almost unassailable. And then you make the, I mean, we need to make the point over and over that the reason they have those advantages is because we helped them pay for that with our money. They were given that step up. That was not, yeah. And we've come along, we have come a long way in some ways from the 10-year-old argument about conflict of interest. Like we, that did not materialize. Thank goodness that Comcast prioritized its own internet TV services over Netflix. And you have people getting into the online video delivery space every day, right? And they are all counting on this infrastructure to be able to deliver the product that they are investing heavily in. So they obviously believe that it's going to be okay on some level or that they're not going to be throttled in an unfair way. So I think ultimately all it comes down to is infrastructure and competition. And let me tell you, folks, as soon as you start to feel that any of these arguments are against your side, you've stopped thinking productively. This is not a one side or another issue unless you're a large company trying to protect your current profit margins. This is not a Republican issue. It's not a Democratic issue. It is an internet issue. It's about internet management. So try your hardest no matter what side you normally are on not to get caught up in that crap because it's only going to confuse the issue. Oh, you're the best, Tom. I love that you think that that could happen. Like people split into right and wrong over a friggin' teabags, dude. Like we can't work together. Do green tea or black tea? How about this? Don't argue with anybody about this on the internet and then maybe you can continue. That's the way about it.