 All right, good afternoon, everyone. It is two o'clock in the afternoon here on the East Coast, the United States. And I want to welcome you to another edition of our 20th anniversary series for public knowledge. I'm Chris Lewis, president, CEO of Public Knowledge. And I want to thank all of you who are joining us. Some of you are probably joining through a webinar on Zoom. Others may be watching on our YouTube channel. We encourage you to check out all of the 20th anniversary webinar sessions on our YouTube channel. And please subscribe to see all of our content online. And you can also follow a conversation about the 20th anniversary of public knowledge using the hashtag 20 years of PK. Really excited about today's hour that we have for our fourth edition, talking about the issue of promoting the open internet through public knowledge's history. The open internet, net neutrality, one of our most popular and best known issues, is an essential fight throughout the entire 20 years of public knowledge's history. And so we have an all-star panel with us today that we're going to bring on one at a time to help us tell the story of what the fight of net neutrality has been like and where it's going into the future. But to kick things off for us in the ground things, we have a wonderful video from one of our champions in the Congress on the issue of net neutrality and open internet. And that's a video from Senator Ed Markey who has led the fight, led the charge in Congress for net neutrality throughout his entire career. Let's watch that video. Thank you for inviting me to speak to you today. I can think of no better way to celebrate public knowledge's 20th birthday than to discuss an issue public knowledge has been meeting the fight on for so many years net neutrality. Public knowledge has been my partner for the last 20 years. We've stood shoulder to shoulder. And it's net neutrality in particular that has bonded us together. I introduced the first net neutrality bill in the House of Representatives in 2006. I'd also like to recognize the great Tom Wheeler, the chairman who put net neutrality on the books at the Federal Communications Commission back in 2016 and who is also speaking with you today. Broadband is absolutely the single most important service that Americans use to communicate with one another. And the COVID pandemic has highlighted what we already knew. Broadband is in a luxury. It is essential. We cannot learn, we cannot work. We cannot stay healthy and safe without broadband. Even today's virtual event would not be possible without it. That's why I want to make this point absolutely clear. In 2021, broadband access to all of this information in our country should be a telecommunications service. Both the plain language and congressional intent behind the Telecom Act of 1996 demonstrates that. So we have to fight to ensure that the online ecosystem remains free and open. And that means restoring FCC authority over broadband. Net neutrality is just another way of saying nondiscrimination. With net neutrality, once you pay your monthly internet service bill, you can go anywhere you want on the internet without your provider slowing you down or blocking your path to any information you want or wherever you want to go. Net neutrality is also a civil rights issue, from Black Lives Matters to the Me Too movement, from high school students demanding gun control to frontline workers calling for fair pay. Today, individuals of all walks of life are carrying the torch of American activism. They're doing it in the streets. And more and more, they are doing it online. In this age of online organizing and activism, net neutrality is more important than ever. And we have to make sure that we stand up and know our mission to enact strong safeguards. Because without FCC authority over broadband, public safety, universal internet access, and broadband competition that directly benefits consumers, it could all suffer. So here's the good news. We're fighting back in 2018. The Senate passed my resolution by a bipartisan vote of 5247, a resolution that would have restored net neutrality. And last Congress, the House passed the Save the Internet Act so that we restore net neutrality. And while Republicans prevented each time, ultimately, these efforts from getting over the finish line on New Day has dawned in Washington and around the country. Once we have three Democrats in place at the Federal Communications Commission, I will strongly urge the commission to reverse the Trump FCC's wrong-headed decision and restore net neutrality and the FCC's authority over broadband. And in the coming weeks, I also plan to introduce legislation to do the same by statute. So that's where I am on this issue. The bottom line, whether it's in the halls of the FCC or the halls of Congress, we're not going to stop until net neutrality is the law of the land. And I am so much looking forward to working shoulder to shoulder with public knowledge to make that happen. You are the leaders. You are the real champions for having the internet be open to anyone, whether it be a voice to be heard or an entrepreneur trying to start up a company. You at public knowledge have been the warriors. And we're going to finish that fight in this Congress. And it will happen because of all of your great work. So thank you for everything you have done and you're going to do to bring this over the finish line. Well, Senator Ed Markey, thank you, Senator, for joining us today virtually. And also thank you for your continued passion in championing this important issue. If folks hadn't heard the news before, he's saying right now on this webinar today that he's going to continue the fight with legislation and at the FCC. And that's important because we've been fighting for many years to make sure that net neutrality, that an open internet, just as the senator defined it, is the law of the land and protects consumers' right to use the internet as it was intended to be used. So we're going to talk about the story of that fight and a little bit also about public knowledge's role in it. But we especially want to talk about the role of the public interest field. And we have a tremendous group of panelists with us. We're going to bring them on one by one to help us tell the story. And for starters, I want to bring on my friend and colleague from public knowledge, our senior vice president, Harold Feld, who has been at public knowledge longer than I have and in the field at the Media Access Project and at public knowledge fighting this fight. Harold, welcome. And I want you, since you've been at this longer than me, I want you to take us back. 2001, public knowledge was founded. And in our first session on the founding of public knowledge, we heard about public knowledge and our allies working to protect something called open access that led to net neutrality. Can you talk about what the fight looked like then? Where did this principle come from? And how did it lead to net neutrality? Sure. I mean, it's sort of an interesting little journey we've been on where during the Clinton administration, the big fight had been about classifying cable modem service as a title to telecommunication service and not to preserve nondiscrimination but actually to import into or potentially to import into the cable modem regime what was the unbundled network element regime that was happening on the telecom side. We had DSL, contrary to what some folks may have said, we did have a period of time when Broadband was tariffed as a title to service. The telecoms filed DSL tariffs in 1998. And at the same time, there was a press in which the telecoms were actually working with us in the public interest community to get the cable modem classified as a title to service. So that was open access. When the Bush administration came in and Michael Powell was made chair of the FCC, he decided that they were going to classify Broadband as an information service. And that went all the way up to the Supreme Court in a case called Brand X. Public knowledge wasn't actually that involved at the time because most of the key events happened almost immediately after public knowledge was founded. We had the FCC's decision in 2002. And then the Ninth Circuit made its decision, which actually reversed the FCC and said, no, this is by statute of title to service. And then it was about three years working up to the Supreme Court where not a lot was going on in this sphere. And then, of course, we had the Brand X case. And the Brand X case, the Supreme Court 6.3 said, OK, the FCC is discretion. They can classify it as an information service. And then things really kicked into overdrive again. Now by this time, we had also had Michael Powell leave the FCC and he was replaced by Kevin Martin as chair. And Kevin Martin found himself in the same position that Jessica Rosenwurzel finds herself in today, which is that there was a 2-2 FCC. And it was taking the Bush administration a long time to find a third commissioner. So in those days, again, people may not believe this, but you used to be able to come to some kind of agreements where you did horse trading for advantages. And what happened was Kevin Martin went to the Democrats, Michael Cops and Jonathan Adelstein, and said, OK, we can try to do a deal now to reclassify DSL as a Title I service and create a common framework. And, you know, or we can just sit here stalled and then when we get a third Republican, I'll just do whatever the heck I want. So Cops and Adelstein struck a deal where the FCC issued something called the Wireline Competition Framework, which reclassified DSL as Title I and did a bunch of other things. But in exchange, they also appended to that what was called the Internet Policy Statement, which took what were called by Michael Powell before freedoms, which were things that he wanted ISPs to just do voluntarily on their own. But the FCC issued a policy statement saying we're going to say that every user has the right to access whatever legal content they want. They have the right to attach any device that doesn't harm the network. They have the right to a competitive environment. Nobody ever figured out really how to do that one. And they have the right to run any lawful application on their device that they want. All of this subject to, quote, reasonable network management. And that became the foundation of the net neutrality as we generally understand it. And fighting about what that means became the basis of the fight for the next five years, where we had some efforts in Congress. You heard Markey say that he introduced his first bill in 2006 about net neutrality. There was a huge, huge fight over an effort to upgrade the Communications Act, where Ted Stevens made his famous series of tubes speech after his effort to push through legislation had not made it. They got a tied voting committee, and that basically killed the legislation. But that's where public knowledge came in, and we were in the thick of things, along with, of course, everybody else who's on this phone call, well, all of my public interest colleagues who are on the phone call, Free Press, OTI, Media Justice, all of us. And when the Obama administration came in, we went into round two. And I'll just pause here, because I'm sure. I don't want you to tell the whole story. We will. Well, exactly. We'll introduce our friends. So I appreciate it. Let's actually, before we bring in our next panelist, so there's Matt Wood. We're going to bring in Matt Wood next. Before I ask you a question, Harold made a good point about the early years, the ox, when net neutrality seemed to be bipartisan, principles from Michael Powell, Republican chairman Ed Markey, introducing legislation with Republican allies in Congress. And I want to show a video from the archives that you can find if you subscribe to Public Knowledge's YouTube channel. You can see the ideological spectrum of the activism back then. Let's show that video. Nope, do we have the video? Well, we don't have the video queued up. That's OK. I encourage folks to go check out our archive. It goes back some 13, 14 years. And in 2006, you can find a video of a leader from moveon.org and the Christian Coalition had a protest talking to a public knowledge camera about the importance of having an open internet to both of them for their advocacy and for their activism. So Matt, you've been in this fight for many years. What was the atmosphere like back then? Why? What's changed? Yeah, it's a great question. And I mean, I was arriving on the scene on the nonprofit side right around that time, sort of right after the Obama administration changeover that Harold got us to. But a lot of this bipartisan activism and support for the idea was happening. 2007 seemed to be a big year in confluence of events of a lot of things happening. So we saw Comcast starting to block peer-to-peer file sharing to a relatively sneaky technical means, but essentially hanging up on people when they were trying to watch videos or even listen to audio files of their choosing. And we also saw this is a little bit outside of the internet space. But again, close enough for all of us, Verizon started to block text messages that Nehrol was sending out to its members. I think the term in the Verizon terms of service was they were allowed to block unsavory text messages. And not only Nehrol, but as you said, the Christian Coalition joined together and they wrote an op-ed together in the Washington Post in 2007 that said, essentially, we don't agree on anything except for this. We can't have the phone company deciding what we say to each other or what we say to our members. So it was very much bipartisan. I love the way Senator Markey phrased it. It's a way I've tried to talk about this all the time. Net neutrality, the term itself, has been pretty popular over the years, but it sometimes had people scratching their heads as to what it means. And it really means nothing more than non-discrimination applied to the telecom operators. Senator Markey also said, that means broadband. I mean, these are the people who just transmit our messages for us and shouldn't be stepping in to tell us what we can say or who we can talk to. And that was a very popular idea on both sides of the aisle, left and right at the time. I may regret saying this later because there are lots of ways to distinguish between them, but in some ways it looked a lot like what we see now with concerns about tech platforms. People on different sides of the aisle saying, well, wait a minute, why do these people get to pick and choose what we can say to each other? And if we do get to that point of relatively complicated, but I think again, pretty straightforward conversation. We at Free Press, I'm sure a lot of people see a difference between Facebook and Comcast. Doesn't mean they're not both powerful, but they are different services. And so the idea that the internet access provider, the broadband network provider could tell you who you talk to was not popular in either the Democratic or Republican party. And that's because that's why we saw that kind of activism but people coming together to say, we are united on this even though we might say directly opposite things to our members once we get to them, we need to have that freedom to actually speak to them and decide what we say to each other because the telecom network provider shouldn't make that choice for us. And so what I think happened, I think you asked like, what changed? Why did that go away? And I don't know how else to say it, but the one where lobbying outside of DC and more recent polling, just to skip ahead to the story a little bit, flash forward, we still see massive support for this notion that the cable company, the phone company can't tell you who to talk to or what you can say once you're talking to them or what videos you can watch. It's like 80% nationwide. I think that poll that we had around the time of the repeal of the most recent rules that started the last presidential administration, the Trump administration, it was like 82% of Republicans opposed taking these rules away. 90% of Democrats, you just don't see those kinds of numbers in other areas. So it still is very much a bipartisan issue outside the Beltway, but inside the Beltway, we saw a very effective lobbying campaign mounted where Republicans on the Hill think one thing and Democrats think another. And it's almost like there's no rationale for it that I can see. Everybody knows how important these networks are. Everybody knows, as I think Harold said, that we all need access to the telecom network to talk to each other. And yet Republicans were very much convinced around this era, when maybe because of the change in the White House and the change in the politics, okay, that's something for the other party to support. And so we really saw again, not among real people, if I may say so, but inside the Beltway, a real erosion of any kind of bipartisanship around this issue. Not because people disagreed on the need to have free and open communications on the internet, but because they really violently disagreed or vehemently disagreed is probably a more apt term about how to do it. Whether the FCC should have the power to do it and how they should articulate that power and those rights and responsibilities that cable and phone companies are obligated to uphold. Fantastic. Thank you, Matt. So we're gonna step forward in the timeline and I remind folks, if you have questions as we go through, we're gonna bring on our third, fourth and fifth panelists and then we'll certainly open it up for questions. So please use the Q and A function to help us collect questions so that I can to ask whatever you'd like to ask of our panelists, but stepping forward in time, we wanna add Stephen Renderos. Stephen Renderos is the executive director of Media Justice, a long time ally of public knowledge and Stephen, Media Justice, a little younger than public knowledge, founded in 2009, I believe. And at that time, quickly joined the fight that Harold and Matt have been describing as we moved out of the arts and into the Obama administration with Chairman Jenikowski leading up the FCC. So, certainly at that time, I know I was working at the FCC at the time, hadn't yet come to public knowledge and it was interesting to see the breath or really the lack of breath of the voices coming to the table and advocating for net neutrality. I want you to tell the folks about how Media Justice is a part of expanding the voices at the table. For sure, well, thanks Chris and thanks for having us here in this event and congratulations to public knowledge on 20 years. Here's for another 20. So, yeah, I mean, I think it's funny we're kind of going in the sequential order where I feel like Harold was in the fight like in the early days, Matt came in after and I came in shortly after Matt probably in the late aughts. And actually just to back up, the first time I heard of net neutrality was probably in a meeting in Washington DC as part of a delegation that Media Justice had organized with grassroots activists to DC. And I remember my initial impression being I have no idea what this is and why it matters. The term itself doesn't lend itself to like a whole lot of excitement necessarily. But what was interesting is I went back once I learned about net neutrality I went back to my community I was living in Minneapolis at the time and ended up hosting an internet day of action alongside other partners in our network in the Media Justice Network back in 2010. And we asked people to kind of describe what is it that they want from the internet? And here we are in community with people who don't necessarily have regular at that time didn't have regular access to the internet really struggled to afford it but still saw the value in it. And the things that they described that they wanted may not have echoed exactly what net neutrality is like they didn't have the language to say you don't want blocking we don't want throttling we don't want paid prioritization we want bright line rules like that wasn't part of our vernacular but the things that they wanted were all things that are about net neutrality and its importance they wanted the ability to tell their stories they wanted to connect to family in the newest way that we could connect with each other and communicate with each other they wanted to bypass the media gatekeepers that often ignored their perspective or their stories. And I walked away feeling from those experiences that here was this very critical issue that was a debate that was largely happening in Washington DC. And it felt like there were net neutrality tech nerds on one side and internet service providers on the other side. And when it came to the perspective of communities of color who are the community that we were in particular focused on, our perspective was not being heard and not part of the conversation and our elected officials in the Congressional Black Caucus Congressional Hispanic Caucus and Asian Pacific American Caucus largely echoed at that time the positions of the internet service providers and that's a credit I think to the lobbying power that Matt was describing previously that kind of shift in really trying to echo a different position around net neutrality and unfortunately that was to our detriment. So one of the things we did as an organization very early on is we as a strategy was to move the conversation outside of Washington DC and we started doing town halls with officials at the FCC. Actually one of the very first events I organized for media justice was a town hall in Minneapolis in my home community where we packed the Southside High School with over 200 people in a room and there was a very young, very newly appointed Mignon Clyburn that was a part of that event alongside former commissioner Michael Cops and they got to hear from everyday people. They heard testimony from people reiterating the things that they wanna see from the internet that all echoed net neutrality. We did similar events in Albuquerque. Mr. Wheeler who's coming up a little bit later participated in an event that we organized at Oakland similarly packed with tons of people. So I think we wanted to demonstrate that this was a conversation that people wanted to be a part of that it mattered to people for different reasons than maybe the conversation that was happening at Washington DC. I do think one of the things that happened between that period of 2010 up until 2015 is that the issue became much more relevant to people. What we saw during that time period was a hashtag turned from an online conversation between three black women grieving the loss of another young black child in Trayvon Martin and sparking that conversation into an offline movement which now we know is Black Lives Matter. We saw the growth, we saw the kind of visibility of people decrying police violence in a way that we hadn't really seen before and the internet and neutral internet is what allowed that to happen. We actually organized the delegation alongside our friends of Free Press and Color of Change back in 2014 where we brought leaders from the different kind of chapters of Black Lives Matter from different black women organizations to meet with representative John Lewis and he walked away from that experience for the first time taking a very public position on net neutrality and he said, we cannot let the interest of profits silence the voices of those pursuing human dignity. And that is at its core why for us, for people of color, net neutrality mattered so much. We may not have had the language to say net neutrality is a racial justice issue but through our experiences, through our work, we were able to demonstrate that in action and I think we just marked the year since the killing of George Floyd earlier this week and what sparked in its aftermath was the largest global uprising of people in our country's history. And I think we can credit a neutral net in really providing the infrastructure for visibility and that's why that fight mattered to us and it will continue to matter to us moving forward. That's fantastic, Steven. Thank you for your work and your contribution to the field and this conversation. I was telling you earlier how my experience with the issue working at the FCC in 2009 to 2012 and then coming to public knowledge, the political change that happened because of the broadening of the voices at the table was stark and represented easily just by the letters that we were getting from Congress when I was at the FCC versus the ones we saw sent when I was at public knowledge during the Wheeler era, 72 or 74-ish Democrats writing in and saying that they didn't want the FCC to go down the road rather using Title II in 2009, 2010, most of them from the black and Hispanic caucuses, there were also some blue dog Democrats in there as well. That simply didn't happen and to see how the outreach had an impact in the 2015 fight was significant. So kudos to you for your contributions. I wanna also add in Sarah Morris who's with us. Sarah Morris is the director of the Open Technology Institute at New America and Sarah, we've gotten a real great story here going but we're leaving out a major aspect of the fight that I know public knowledge is cared about because we've partnered with you on it and that's the fight in the courts. The court decisions, the judicial decisions around net neutrality have really anchored and pivoted the debate towards the really strong internet rules that we got in 2015. Which of the pivotal moments in the courts do you think are most notable? Thanks so much, Chris. Yeah, it's been for those who may be watching, who haven't been as directly involved in the litigation which is a lot of people. It's been sort of a very active but behind the scenes part of the fight for strong net neutrality protections. So I'm gonna talk about one and an area where as Chris notes, we have been in direct partnership with both public knowledge and pre-pressed as co-lit against represented by the amazing Kevin Russell who was our attorney in both the US telecom, the FCC and in Mozilla, the FCC. Though we were also directly involved with media justice, for example, as well because they were heavily involved behind the scenes and in the litigation efforts as well. So I'll start with a more public example of what I think is one of the most pivotal court and one of the more newsworthy court moments. And that was in the oral arguments for Verizon, the FCC. Now this was, I won't say it was before my time but it was as I was coming into the, more squarely into the advocacy scene. I started actually at Media Access Project in 2010 working with Matt Wood and with the legacy of Harold and many other amazing advocates having been, having gone through Media Access Project as well. And then I started at OTI in 2011. So I actually was at the 2013 oral arguments in Verizon, the FCC where Verizon was challenging the 2010 open internet order. And there, Verizon's attorney Helgi Walker famously said that she was authorized to speak for her clients today that but for these FCC rules, we would be exploring these types of arrangements, these types of arrangements referring to things like the ability to block slower prioritized content for a fee as the company chooses. These were precisely the things that we had argued that would risk harming internet users and while everyone told us, no, this is a fight without, the problem isn't actually there. This is a fight without a real fundamental problem. And at that moment, we were able to point to those comments and say, no, this is where the internet ecosystem is heading if we don't have strong regulatory engagement and strong net neutrality protections in place. And so I think that really solidified for many the need for net neutrality protections and really set the stage for the next phase of the net neutrality fight, which is where all of us I think came together. And so in the second thing I'll point to is less of a specific moment and really, again, this untold success story behind the scenes where a bunch of groups, a bunch of public interest organizations, grassroots organizations, community groups, companies, trade associations all came together to do one of the hardest things to do as a group. And that's the participants in a major appellate litigation. And I think it's really fascinating to think about how much of the movement around net neutrality that was building outside of the courts, the community engagement that Stephen mentions, the stories that we were able to tell and the connections that we were able to make for folks on the ground. They're like, this is the curious, the language that's happening in DC. We wanna make sure that your stories are part of that conversation, as well as just the meticulous regulatory work and advocacy that was happening among others on this panel. Behind the scenes though, we were having to leverage all of that good work, package it in these briefs that were extremely limited in terms of word length and coverage, making sure we weren't duplicative of other briefs, making sure that we had a star or that we were engaged with a number of, not just interveners and petitioners, but also a meekie who were filing their own briefs and sort of like navigating this need to unpack a really complicated set of issues from a legal standpoint. Obviously the issue of net neutrality is pretty straightforward, but getting it all right in a way that is defensible in court is much harder. And it was really a pivotal moment, a pivotal period of time for me as an advocate and as a lawyer to see that litigation come together so constructively, which doesn't happen in even the best circumstances normally in a public litigation. And we had just an enormous amount of stakeholders engaged, an enormous amount of appellate attorneys engaged and an enormous amount of attorneys who were not appellate attorneys, but who were subject matter experts on net neutrality issues, all in various rooms, trying to package our knowledge and expertise into, I think an 8,000 word interveners brief in the case of US telecom, the FCC and then the petitioners brief in challenging the FCC's repeal of net neutrality in Mozilla, the FCC. And there was a degree to which we all had to kind of put egos at the door the best we could and really come together for the common goal, which was to preserve strong net neutrality protections and to ensure that they were on solid legal footing. The other thing that I would add just as context is that the court fights were not just about the discrete period of time where we were involved in active litigation. We had to be thinking about that litigation even as we were engaging with the FCC in the lead up to the 2015 open internet order. And we're gonna hear next from FCC chairman Tom Wheeler, who have heard from many of us where we were pushing him and his team of lawyers to really do the right thing and put the rules on solid legal footing so that we had the best chance to succeed in court. And we ultimately did. And I think the fact that we were successful in court in US telecom, the FCC and were, you know, successful on a few key issues in Mozilla, the FCC is a testament to this like long-term strategic legal thinking and also the ability for all of us to come together in a way that really maximized our individual strengths and organizational strengths and individual expertise to really create a strong litigation strategy. Fantastic, thank you, Sarah. And correct me if I'm wrong, but never in these court cases have we lost on the strength of whether net neutrality is righteous or not. It's always been the discretion of the agency to decide these things. And that's why we're really excited to have former FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler with us. Chairman Wheeler, thank you for joining this ragtag group of activists. This ain't no ragtag group, this is a group of doers. Well, we appreciate you taking the time out. And again, folks, we have some good questions coming in, but please continue to throw them our way in the Q and A. Chairman Wheeler, you know, 20 years of public knowledge, you spent a whole term about four years or so, maybe a little less as chairman of the FCC. You got a lot of pressure from groups like us and my allies here. What was it like inside the agency? And tell us how the work that you've heard described by the pro-net neutrality advocates, how it actually works in impacting what decisions you made. Well, first of all, let's start by saluting public knowledge and your 20 years of contributions. One of the things you learn when you're in a job like the chairman of the FCC is that there are slogans and there are solutions. And public knowledge and the kind of folks that we've seen on this session today were helping find solutions. And then let me just clarify one thing that you just said that throughout the Obama administration, we were all pro-net neutrality. The question wasn't whether, the question was how. And, you know, I will proudly sit here and say that my proudest accomplishment as chairman was the open internet order in 2015. And the great job that Sarah and so many others and John Salot, our general counsel who argued the case did for the first time, have a win. You know, Harold took us way back in this history. You know, it was a decade that the idea of open access, non-discriminatory access to the network had been going to court and getting slapped down. And for the first time, it stood up. And so as I say, that's my proudest moment. You know, I think the lamest effort by the rather lame Trump FCC was the repeal of net neutrality and that we need to get it back in its fullness as quickly as possible. Because, you know, we've been talking about it here as though this is something kind of new. No, this is, you know, I'm a history buff. I mean, you go back 700 years to the beginning of English common law and the responsibility that a provider of a key service had the duty to deal. You know, it was that concept that helped overcome feudalism. You move up to the Pacific Telegraph Act in 1860 in which Congress said, it'll be non-discriminatory access, first come, first serve access to this new network, an idea that we then moved over into the telephone network. And, you know, Matt made a really good point and discussed how the industry tried to reshape the issues. But what was really going on was that the industry seized upon the movement from analog networks to digital networks to say, no, this is different. And these kinds of open access, non-discriminatory concepts should not apply because somehow zeros and ones are different from a waveform. And really what was going on was they were saying, we're jealous of the amount of money that is being made by the people who use our network and where is our ability to apply a chokehold and have some kind of remuneration that will put us in the league like that. So, and that's what we're all talking about. I mean, this is basic kind of stuff. And as I said, the question in the Obama administration was never whether, but how? And it was affected by the environment. You know, you've got to think back to the situation, you know, in 2009 when President Obama came to office, we were in the middle of the Great Recession, just coming out and starting to come out of the Great Recession. Chairman Jedokowski was made particularly aware of that and the impact they would have because the ISPs went around complaining that they will not be able to invest in the economic recovery so important to this country if this kind of regulation was put on. And to his credit, Julius tried to figure out how can we get title two responsibilities going back to those nondiscriminatory responsibilities without tripping this wire that they've been going around saying it'll hurt the overall economy. And that, of course, was the issue that the court, that Verizon appealed upon and that the court found that no, if you're going to do this, you can't do that halfway. So I was just in office for a couple of months when that court decision came down. I thought that the court was saying to us, section 706 is the way you can accomplish those goals and have net neutrality and avoid the kind of decade-long reversal by the court and in large part thanks to the good efforts of the folks on this call and others, I became aware of the fact that there was a real hole in that logic which was that the test in section 706 was the practice commercially viable. And that was a relatively undefined term unlike Justin Reasonable, which has been in the Communications Act forever. And that commercially viable could actually end up being, well, is it viable for the company rather than is it a commercially viable service for consumers? And so that was one aha moment. The other was the great job that you all did in bringing forth the realities of this whole investment issue. And the economy had changed by that point in time. And you all did a terrific job educating everyone about the hollowness of that threat. And I guess that's really all you could call it was a threat. And so I could tell you some interesting stories about being holed up to Congress to meet with the chairman of all the relevant committees, all Republicans who said to me, you're going to do it this way. And I said, with all due respect, I don't think we're going to do it that way. That was in November and we finally decided in February. But we all know what the outcome was, a three to two vote and that put net neutrality in place and then being sustained the good work that Sarah and others did by the DC circuit. Two quick addenda that I go back that court decision was the first time ever the concept had been upheld in court. And second, as my friend Matt Wood has pointed out and they've got a great paper that Free Press has put out, the whole facade of this investment and harming investment issue has fallen away since the Trump FCC repeal of the rule when Free Press has demonstrated in their paper how on an inflation adjusted investment, infrastructure investment by the companies that were no longer having to abide by net neutrality actually went down. So, so much for that canard. It's time to get it back. And let me just say one other thing. Not only when you get it back, do we have to have title two back, not these shams of no blocking, no throttling. And by the way, do you notice that the companies have dropped no paid prioritization from the list of the things that they say is the definition of- I've noticed. I've noticed. So there's a signal. But not only do you have to have title two, but you've got to have the general conduct rule, which we put in, because not only do you deal with the actions of the ISPs as common carriers, but you have to have the flexibility to be able to deal with new technological innovations, new marketplace innovations, and not have the agency with its feet in cement for an idea that worked when it was enacted, but times changed and it doesn't. So you have to have the general conduct rule. So that's a perfect way to help bring this story into the present and into the future as well, because we have seen with the 2017 repeal of the net neutrality rules, we have seen a history, a recent history of potential net neutrality violations, but without an agency to actually look at them or investigate them. Yeah, we've also had very strong rules. Most would argue stronger than the 2015 rules implemented in California. And Matt, maybe you can say a little bit about how they've gone a step further, where the general conduct standard that the chairman talked about allowed for the FCC to look at new business models, things like zero rating that were not necessarily banned by the 2015 rules. And then the California rules, I guess they go further. Can you explain that? Yeah, I mean, the rules that California adopted to fill this vacuum created by the Trump FCC, Chairman Pi and his colleagues repealing the rules, they're definitely more explicit. I would hesitate to say stronger in some kind of like direct apples to apples kind of comparison because they're slightly different and they don't deal with some of the other many topics that title two is important for like broadband affordability and competition and all the other things that we need to restore these communications rights for. What I think they do to pick up where the chairman left off is they take the FCC's residual power to prevent discriminatory conduct by internet service providers, whatever that may be, even if it's not articulated in the current rule and the California rules, as you said, actually make some of those specific decisions and say zero rating the practice of letting you use one site, but not another and not having that one counting against your data cap. And oh, by the way, the one that doesn't count against your data cap is probably the one that AT&T owns, right? That's the kind of gamesmanship that we see. And so that's where California said, yeah, we're gonna say that is not always, there are certain forms of it that we're not prohibited by the rules, but certainly can be discriminatory and be tipping the scale and preventing people from using the content application services, having the conversations that they choose to have. So I think the other reason the California rules are so important isn't just that they got more specific on zero rating and on this question of interconnection, like how do the networks actually connect to each other and what's happening behind that last mile, if you will, Comcast and others have come in and said, well, we're not slowing down your connection, Chris Lewis, but we are choking off the content further upstream. That's okay, right? And we'd say, no, that's not okay either. The reason the California rules are so important isn't just for adding some more definitions to and structure to these non-discrimination concepts because they basically came into play just as the FCC rules were wrongly being swept off of the books by this FCC. So when the internet service providers and some of the people who like to chortle along with them say, well, nothing changed, what are you talking about? There was no massive collapse when these rules went away. It's because the ISPs are not dumb and they knew that they were in litigation in federal court about the FCC rules and they're still in litigation about those California rules. So I think that's the real story here about the future of this. It's not that the rules went away and nothing changed. It's in fact that the rules have always been with us in one form or another going back to centuries ago as the chairman pointed out, these kinds of common carrier concepts, they've just changed form and sometimes changed location as to where they reside in the law, whether federal or state. And that's why we need to have these concepts put back into federal law, can't just rely on California but can look to California and say thank you very much for helping to keep this question live and keep some of these worst industry impulses in check by filling that vacuum that arose when the FCC took away its own rules. Fantastic, thank you, Matt. We're running out of time. We've got maybe five minutes left. So I wanna touch on a couple of things really quickly. Number one, I think Matt mentioned this, but it's been said by some, certainly by folks like the CEO of AT&T that net neutrality may not be important anymore because of the impact of dominant digital platforms on our internet ecosystem. True, false, neither, how do we answer that? And let's see, I think Harold and if you have a quick answer and if anyone else. There's an old expression in the Talmud that says, if you've eaten garlic, you don't make your breath sweeter by eating more garlic. The fact that there may be bad actors at the application level, that we have monopolies that are at the infrastructure level and then we have other monopolies at the top level, it doesn't make net neutrality less important. It just means we have more problems that we need to solve. Okay, all right. Yeah, this goes back to what I was, this goes, I love that, Harold. That's just fabulous. It comes from ancient wisdom, Chairman. Exact makes it even better. He beat my 700 years for going back, okay? But the point of the matter is that really what the carriers are saying here is, they can do it, why can't I? It's not fair. And they used to make that argument to us all the time. And the answer is, excuse me, the FCC has jurisdiction over networks and we're gonna take care of that jurisdiction and what the responsibilities of networks are. And if they had been smart, rather than spending all their time getting the Trump FCC to dump the 2015 rule, they should have gone to the FTC, to the Congress and elsewhere saying, and now take those kinds of non-discrimination, open access rules and make them apply to everybody. But no, they got greedy. And they said, no, we can get rid of them. And they haven't dealt with the thing that upset them in the first place, which was that it's not fair that we have to bear these rules and others don't. And to be consistent, public knowledge, Chairman Wheeler, a lot of our friends on this call, we're all calling for both net neutrality and non-discrimination rules at the network level and for regulations for dominant digital platforms as well. So non-discrimination is an important principle. Really quickly, we did get this question from the Q&A that I think we should make sure that we address on screen here. And the question is around, it's long, but I would paraphrase, I guess, to paraphrase it as questioning if net neutrality or whether net neutrality is a racial justice issue, that somehow discrimination by price may, or discrimination by speed and price, may benefit folks who are in marginalized communities. I don't know if anyone wants to take that and dive into why it's a racial justice issue. Steven, see you on me. I'll take a quick stab at it and other folks can feel free to jump in. I mean, I think fundamental in the question about, shouldn't they be allowed to discriminate is who actually gets to decide what deserves prioritization? And I think the thing for me is the history, going back to trying to learn from what's come before us, the history of companies making those choices have always left people of color at the margins. As a study that was done by one of our members out here in Oakland, then look at broadband deployment in Oakland, and you could overlay a map of really low speeds, really subpar service with a map of historical bank redlining and they'd be all in the black and brown neighborhoods of Oakland, same thing NDIA, the National Digital Inclusion Alliance did a similar study looking at AT&T's redlining practices in Cleveland. The neighborhood that I'm from in Los Angeles has seen historic disinvestment from internet service providers. So I think the history doesn't bear out for me that short of regulation that prevents discrimination, be it through internet traffic online or offline, these companies won't make choices that are in the interest of communities of color. And I think that's why we need regulation. And I think it's to the question of how to deal with the tech platforms is a both and. We need regulation that reigns in and sets the vehicle for ISPs. And we need the same thing for tech platforms. And that's why for me, I think we need regulation. It's the only thing that really prevents the kind of anti-discriminatory behavior that we've seen these companies routinely take. Matt, real quick, do you have 30 seconds? Yeah, I know we're short on time, but I mean, the end of the question said, wouldn't it benefit people if they could buy a lower price broadband subscription? We have to worry about those prices being too high, different set of issues. But yes, that does benefit people sometimes and they can do that. That neutrality does not say that your ISP has to sell everybody the same speed. It says once they've sold you that speed, they can't slow down certain websites. They can't say, oh, we don't like the public knowledge webinar today. So we're gonna make that go slower and make something else go faster. So I think that's one of the common misconceptions that somehow that neutrality makes different speed tiers illegal. And while we might say that all speed tiers are overpriced or tend to be, that's not what this is about. This is about not letting them tell you how you use that plan that you've already purchased. My friends, we are about out of time here, but I really appreciate all of you joining us to tell the story of the 20 years of net neutrality fight during the history of public knowledge. Please do a few things to help support us during this 20th anniversary. All of you who are watching, number one, subscribe to our YouTube channel so you can check out all this content, including our archives from early in the fights. Number two, we hope you'll donate to public knowledge. We've created a friend of public knowledge tier where you can give recurring donations, $20 a month, and join us at our annual IP3 awards if you do that. We'd love to have your support and continue to watch this series. We're gonna have our next series in June is gonna be on the topic of emerging technology. We used to, we're not used to, we still talk about emerging technology in the pre-pandemic days. We used to hold an event called emerging technology. So it should be a great discussion of how we like to try to stay one step ahead of the public interest values with new technology. So thank you all for joining us and we'll see you next time.