 Everyone, we're so excited to have so many of you here. If you could all grab seats, we're really eager to get started. That did no good. If you're hanging near the door, please move to a seat. Oh, at that time it worked. I guess the mic turned on magically. All right, well hello everyone and thank you all so much for joining us today. We're thrilled to have such great attendance at this event and I'm sure there are many more of you watching online, so hello people on the live stream. My name is Sarah Morris and I'm the Director of Open Internet Policy here at the Open Technology Institute. The Open Technology Institute is the sort of tech project arm of New America and we work to preserve an internet that is open, affordable, and secure for all communities. I wanted to go over a few housekeeping things before we turn to our fantastic lineup today of speakers and panelists. In terms of timeline, if you're following religiously to the one online, just a couple of tweaks. We're gonna do Q and A's after each panel just because it's such a long event. We wanna make sure that we capture you while you're here for the panel that you're here to see. Hopefully you're here for the whole event but we wanna make sure that the Q and A happens in proximity to the panelists that are discussing. So we'll do an hour of discussion including Q and A for the first panel and then an hour for the second panel and then we will wrap up and there will be a reception right outside this hallway. So thank you all. I'm so honored to introduce first to you our keynote Federal Communications Commissioner, Meanyan Clyburn. A trailblazer and long-standing defender of the public interest, Commissioner Clyburn is currently serving for eight year as FCC commissioner. She has served as the first and to this day only acting Chairwoman of the FCC in 2013 and during her time at the FCC, Commissioner Clyburn has been a true champion for equality in the communication space and has consistently fought on behalf of communities whose voices frequently are not heard. She has advocated for a free and open internet for fair and just phone call rates for prisoners and their families and for the modernization of the lifeline subsidy program to include broadband in an effort to bridge the digital divide. Commissioner Clyburn's tireless efforts have recently included tours of the US well have always included tours of the US and including her recent connecting communities tour where she visited with folks nationwide to learn how communications policies that we're enacting here in DC can improve the lives of Americans all across the country. And so with that, I will invite the commissioner to the stage and thank you so much for joining us. Good afternoon everyone. What a pleasure it is to join you. Thank you, Sarah, for that kind introduction. I'd like to recognize, I know she's in the audience, Commissioner Gloria Trisani, where are you? There you are. It's good to see you again and a lot of advocates including Andy back there who life would not be life without those two individuals and all of you. Because we're not supposed to play favorites, right? But seriously, Sarah and everyone, it is a pleasure for me to be a part of today's conversation on net neutrality and the economy. Making the business case is a theme many of you have heard me repeat time and time again in recent months. And despite the rhetoric to the contrary, robust net neutrality rules are good for the economy. They not only provide certainty, they help to promote investment in innovation. They help to create avenues for greater access to goods and services and they make it possible for millions of Americans and millions worldwide to enjoy a limitless social, economic, and educational opportunities. This is why it's so noteworthy that you have gathered such an impressive lineup of presenters, not only to speak about the consumer benefits which are the most important aspect from where I sit, but to allow this business major to find her inner geek and not feel guilty about it by touching on the business case as well. I'm reminded of a timeless saying, the customer is always right. Just in case you didn't know, that saying was popularized in 1909 by Harry Gordon Selfridge, who is the founder of the Selfridge department store in London and it's relevance when it comes to the day's discussion for me is two fold. First, it reminds customers they should get good service when they patronize a business and second, it reemphasizes to those employees that job number one is to give good service to those customers. Part of this dual goal of giving and getting is the exchange of goods and services and even without a background in banking and finance and economics, the concept of giving customers what they want and how they wanted is a common sense good business practice. Most of the successful tech companies have been built on anticipating and understanding customer needs even before that potential customer realizes exactly what they want, need, or how it should be packaged. And what is so amazing about an open internet is that it has allowed thousands of new market entrance to compete and thrive. Take Amazon, you know that small company, Amazon, and it's successful introduction of internet shopping. But what's most notable to me is the recent fall in value of grocery store stock prices when Amazon announced their proposed acquisition of Whole Foods. I felt sorry for a couple of my favorite stores at the time but I think, well, I won't predict who will be okay. And that's the beauty of all of this from where I sit, that you can't predict who's going to be okay. And that is why it's so important for us to have an open platform because we shouldn't be able to predict who's going to be okay. Now think about how the internet video market place has been revolutionized. And the subsequent fall of, you remember Blockbuster, their business model, dozens of companies that did not exist a decade ago. And even more companies that we thought would span the test of time. Some of them are fixtures, others, we barely remember their names, thanks to an open internet. So it's not only shocking, but I must admit to you, it's a bit distressing. Given the success of such an amazing empowering framework that we are actually on the cusp of seeing many of our most impressive and innovative gains at risk. The promise of a future filled with internet fast lanes available only to businesses big enough to pay for them may just be a few months away from being a reality. And as far as the next generation of start-up wonder kinds, they may be foiled before they even have a chance to thrive. This is why business major geeks like me and movers and shakers with multiple disciplines like you must support, must push for an environment which encourages seamless entry, which enables limitless success of smaller players and everyday people who have always been the economic backbone of this great nation. They are the ones on the cutting edge of innovation. They are the ones who push and pull. They are the ones boasting job opportunities and investments in their communities. And they are the ones who would be most harmed by that destroying internet freedom and PRM. Collectively, we have no other option, but to make sure that no one with a dream, no one with a drive, no one with a talent gets priced out of a seat on that innovation and opportunities train. Through the efforts of so many in this room, we are able to reach a point back in 2015 that so many thought was impossible. We adopted robust, legally sustainable open internet rules, and while I will be quick to concede that the journey ahead may be more difficult because of the shifts in political and the policy and landscape, I say to you that not for one second should we ever think about abandoning Ningship. For millions of consumers, entrepreneurs, school children and seniors, for which the word title, their only reference to the word title might be that possession of that ownership of a car or boat. They are depending on us to support title two, which is the only sustainable way for us to realize the benefit of real net neutrality rules. Will all of our efforts guarantee a win when it comes to a vote? Maybe not. But I say to you that the arc of success is bent in our favor and we are on the right side of history. Now I am heartened that at the very beginning of this latest FCC process, we have already seen another 5 million people speak out and as significant as that is, it still may not be enough. We must each go broader, deeper, form coalitions in interest groups, have discussions in town halls, in church halls, in any hall, about what all of this means to everyday people and communities large and small and how can we can never take any of this for granted. Our most important and precious of protections and the principles on which they are built, they're at stake. And we can ill afford to sit idly by, we can ill afford to get tired. As they are sacrificed at the altar of small government and large business interests, you are in the most unique position to do just that. I am in a unique position to do just that. And together, united, we are the very force needed to do just that. Together, we will ensure that those first amendment principles that distinguish this great nation from so many others around the globe that this applies to a platform that is the most inclusive and empowering of our time. So I say to you, what I say to myself, never ever get tired. Do not get discouraged. And I will say it again, and this has got to be our rallying cry. The arc of history is bent in our favor. Let's ensure, let's make sure that we realize success because it is in our grasp. Thank you very much. Thank you so much, commissioner. As always, you are leading charge of inspiration for all of us, and we are so grateful for your presence and for your words. Next up, I will introduce our following two speakers. So, sorry, Michael, that you have to follow that. Michael Beckerman is currently the president and chief executive officer of the Internet Association, where he represents tech companies, large and small, ranging from Netflix to Etsy to Amazon. Under Beckerman's leadership, the Internet Association has been outspoken supporters of net neutrality rules, strong encryption, and online privacy. Prior to heading the Internet Association, Michael served as the deputy staff director and chief policy advisor to the chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee for 12 years. Kevin Bankston is the director of the Open Technology Institute, having previously served as our director of policy. Kevin has been a fierce advocate for Americans' digital privacy, location privacy, and right to free speech. He fought for these ideals and against government surveillance, a senior counsel and the director of the Free Expression Project at the Center for Democracy and Technology, and before that, as a senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. As head of OTI, Kevin leads our efforts to make sure every community has equal access to an Internet that is both open and secure. So, Mike, with that, I'll welcome Michael Beckerman to the stage. Thank you. Thank you for being here, and thank you OTI and all of our seats and the millions watching at home on the live stream. It is hard following. Commissioner Klapper, she took everything I was gonna say, and so I'll be brief. I just wanna make a couple of points. One, one of the great things about the Internet is it really is this virtuous circle of innovation and investment and benefits to our economy and consumers. I'm gonna talk about that today. And so, one, as websites and apps are innovating and building out great new products that people want, it helps to increase demand for broadband. And as the demand for broadband increases, it's great that the Internet service providers are investing in their networks as they have been the last few years, creating faster speed and more bandwidth for all of us to use. And as that happens, it enables websites and apps to build and innovate and create greater products. And that cycle continues and continues. But the underlying piece that allows that to happen are these net neutrality rules, which has enabled an incredible amount of innovation and a low-barred entry. And Commissioner Clyburn pointed out the rise of Netflix and maybe the fall of Blockbuster and all the great new products and services that have come out about the last few years. The reason it is because the barrier entry is low. It's easy to start a new app. It's easy to start a new website. And the best products and the best services for consumers are the ones that win because you don't have gatekeepers making it impossible to get in with barriers to entry that are prohibited. And that exists in other sectors of our economy and that's fine and every sector is different. But one of the things that makes the Internet great is the ability that anybody with a great idea can have an opportunity to turn that into a real business that benefits our economy and consumers. And again, the point of that is net neutrality and the strong rules that underline that have enabled the innovation that we've seen in our economy. And so thank you everybody for being here and look forward to hearing from our panelists and hearing more about the investment and the benefits of the economy of these rules. Thank you. Hello, hi. As Sarah noted, I'm Kevin Banks. I'm the director of the Open Technology Institute here at New America and just wanted to thank all of you for being here today, especially FCC Commissioner Clyburn who is fighting tirelessly at the FCC and Michael representing the Internet industry who have been key allies in this fight. We don't always agree with the Internet companies but on a range of issues including this one, the fight to defend encryption, the fight for surveillance reform, close collaboration with civil society and the Internet industry is a must if we're gonna win the day and we must win the day. Finally, thanks to Sarah Morris, the director of Open Internet Policy here at OTI for making this event possible. Sarah and her team have been fighting here at OTI in favor of strong neutrality rules for years, rules that would allow Americans to access the Internet without manipulation by ISPs. The FCC took up a strong set of rules in 2015 that implemented the tenets of free speech and open Internet prohibiting broadband companies from picking winners and losers by blocking or slowing the Internet access of particular sites or services or favoring their own. These rules are crucial to the technical openness of the Internet, to freedom of speech, to competition online, to the Internet economy as a whole and they are now under threat. According to the FCC, 58% of homes in 2016 had either one or no high-speed Internet service provider. This level of market consolidation gives providers a tremendous amount of control over how Americans access information and entertainment, tools for education, job opportunities, healthcare and so much more. This power builds on their existing control that they have as gatekeepers between their subscribers and the Internet and as gatekeepers for the myriad businesses of all sizes that use the Internet to connect with those subscribers. The Internet has long enabled the new market entrance to sell their products online and develop their brands without the need for a physical store, giving small startup companies the chance to become big and creating important new online services out of often tiny initial investments. But it's not just Internet companies that rely on the Internet anymore. Companies in virtually every sector rely heavily on the Internet to conduct their business and connect with their customers. The same Internet users who have come to rely on the Internet as a vital platform for civic engagement and democratic discourse. Killing the current net neutrality rules would put all of this at risk but that is what our FCC chairman intends to do based on the claim that the rules stifled broadband investment and have hurt rather than helped the spread of high-speed Internet access to more Americans. That assumption, however, as you will hear at length today is not backed up by the facts. Research shows that Internet service providers' investments have gone up in the years since the FCC passed its net neutrality rules based on broadband companies' own filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission and their investor calls. These companies are consistently telling their investors that business is booming and, by the way, they're bound by law to tell the truth when they're saying that. Meanwhile, the cable industry, their own top lobbying group, recently contradicted the chairman's own argument by publicizing a report that showed how Internet speeds have substantially increased in the time since the FCC approved its open Internet rule. Yet, at the same time, they and the chairman are claiming that net neutrality is hurting the Internet. Opponents of the net neutrality rules are consistently caught in this sort of double-speak, grasping its straws in their effort to find credible evidence that the net neutrality rules have had a negative impact on the economy. Today, we're going to examine some of the Internet associations, contrary evidence, as well as research from Free Press, showing that investments from cable and broadband companies have increased in the past two years. We'll also hear from representatives from the Internet industry and the startup community, including Engin, Vimeo, Etsy, and again, the Internet Association, whose success serves as proof that the net neutrality rules have helped contribute to the boom in the Internet and broadband fueled economy that we all enjoy today. Importantly, we will also be hearing from our civil society allies at Free Press and at Color of Change. They bring an important perspective in highlighting how strong net neutrality rules are critical in creating better opportunities and bigger voices for all communities, especially those that have been historically marginalized. In addition to being a free speech issue, an innovation issue, and an economic issue, net neutrality is also a racial justice issue and needs to be discussed as such. So let's get that and all the other discussions started. Please welcome me and please join me in welcoming Noah Theron, Internet Association's Vice President of Public Affairs and Communications, and our moderator today, and our esteemed panelists who they will introduce. Thank you very much. All right, thanks everybody for joining us. We appreciate it. So welcome to our panel, which is entitled Unpacking the Economics of Net Neutrality and Broadband of Investments as the current FCC looks to unwind the 2015 Open Internet Order, which implemented clear and legally sustainable rules for net neutrality. The conversation about ISB investment since the 2015 Open Internet Order was implemented has come front and center, and opponents to net neutrality are looking to frame a narrative that around the investment that is being used as the basis for reversing the rules, and so today we're gonna be talking about that. One thing I should say is news flash, we disagree with that. What you'll hear over the next 40 minutes is evidence of a thriving ecosystem which benefits strong and enforceable net neutrality rules, and we should also mention that we think the fact that ISPs investing in their networks is a good thing. It proves that the virtuous circle which Michael talked about is in fact that as ISPs invest in their networks and provide higher speeds for people, the edge where internet companies live, the people that we represent at the Internet Association is able to create new and exciting products that spurs even more demand for the internet, and so as we on the edge and as ISPs investing in that work, it only makes the internet a better place, and I think you're gonna hear a lot more about that. But if you don't believe us on the investment story, we thought we'd take a minute to show a quick video and have the ISPs tell it in their own words. Here at Internet Association, we believe in enforceable net neutrality rules, like the ones currently in the United States and the ones currently on the books that let consumers, not ISPs, decide which services are best. What are ISPs saying about net neutrality? Well, it depends who they're talking to. In 2014, AT&T told the FCC that the net neutrality rules we currently have in place would abruptly stall the virtuous circle of investment. But in January, AT&T played a different tune. Moving to cash flows, we had more than $39 billion in cash from operations for the full year. That's a record for us. This allowed us to return substantial value to the shareholders who do it and while also investing more in capital than we ever had before. And he added, our fiber buildout continues to be a great story. So as our fiber deployment accelerates, we're excited about this growth opportunity. And Comcast, in 2014, they told the FCC that net neutrality will stifle capital investment and deter network investment and innovation. But this year, Comcast had a sunnier story for investors. Through consistent investment and innovation, we offer the best broadband product on the market. We double the capacity of our network every 18 to 24 months. These investments enhance our competitive position, allowing us to continue to take advantage of opportunities to grow penetration and market share. That doesn't exactly sound like network investment has been stifled. And what about Verizon? In 2014, they told the FCC inflexible net neutrality rules would undercut the innovation and investment that characterized today's internet. But this year, they announced a billion dollar long-term investment in fiber. Earlier this week, we announced a strategic agreement with Corning, with whom we have a long relationship to supply optical fiber and hardware solution of at least $1.05 billion from 2018 to 2020. ISPs are legally obligated to tell their investors the truth. So, which story should we believe? Okay. And if you wanna watch that again, you can go to internetassociation.org where it should be pretty easy to find. Well, I'm joined here today with three excellent panelists. Matt Wood is the policy director at Free Press where he works to protect the open internet, prevent media concentration, promote affordable broadband deployment and safeguard press freedom. Before joining Free Press, he worked at the public interest law firm Media Access Project and in the communications practice groups of two private law firms in Washington, D.C. Before that, he served as the editor-in-chief for the Harvard Civil Rights Liberty's Law Review, worked for PBS and spent time at several professional and college radio television stations. He earned his BA in film studies from Columbia University and is JD from Harvard. Yeah? Libby Watson is a staff writer at Covering Tech Policy at Gizmodo. She's covered the net neutrality debate extensively prior to Gizmodo. Libby was a staff writer at the Sunlight Foundation and before sunlight, Libby was a researcher at Media Matters where she monitored cable and online news. And lastly, Dr. Christopher Hooten, my colleague at the Internet Association is our chief economist. He's an expert at economic development analysis, spatial analysis and evaluation. In his role at IA, he leads all our economic analysis and research on a wide array of topics including net neutrality and many of the other issues that we're working on on a daily basis. So thank you everybody for joining us. Libby, I just wanted to allow you a minute to give us a state of play of where we stand in net neutrality and what you see as an outside observer from your perch as a reporter at Gizmodo. Sure, yeah. I won't try to talk too long because obviously you're all very, very clever and I'm interested in what you have to say. But yeah, I mean, I think the issue with the investment debate, which is really a debate that very few people are having. This is sort of battle of the nerds think tank debate rather than anything that almost any Americans know is happening. That doesn't mean it's not important. But I think that structure really favors the ISPs. It's very helpful to them if the debate is not on the merits of whether net neutrality is a good thing and whether this rule might make it go away, which they've also been arguing that these rules weren't. But they would rather argue about these sort of wonky investment figures because saying this harm's investment, it's another version of this kills jobs, basically. I think that sounds great. And they would rather not argue about whether or not net neutrality is a good thing because most people obviously do think net neutrality is a good thing. There was a poll out this morning, 59% of Democrats support net neutrality or rather 61% of Democrats support net neutrality and 59% of Republicans do. So it's clearly not an issue where they're gonna be able to activate partisan leanings. So I think this is a great way for them to frame the debate. Unfortunately, that doesn't mean that people who know the truth don't have to respond. But yeah, I mean, the argument about investment, I follow obviously the cable lobby and then various affiliated think tanks and blogs and their studies about why it's harmed investment. And they never really seem to detail exactly how the net neutrality rules would have harmed investment. What this huge burden that the net neutrality rules supposedly imposed on them is. Sometimes they'll talk about the transparency reporting climates, which I mean, Crimean River, honestly. But otherwise it's clearly, they've thought as far as proving that, as far as they see it, that net neutrality is harm investment and not really explaining much beyond that. And Matt, you've, Free Press has issued a voluminous report talking about ISP investment and I know that you wanted to do a quick summary of the report. And so let's go for 120 pages in a couple minutes. Easy. No, that's right. I scrambled over there when the video was on because I have this tall guy syndrome of thinking him in the way. So if I stay here, I don't know if people can actually see what we'll be putting up in a second. Maybe I should go up there. Okay, let me do that. You stay there. And we'll have the debate of the, would you call it the battle of the nerds or something like that? Sounds like a film. So we will have some slides up in a second and I don't usually do prepared remarks but as Noah's indicating, it's a lot to squish into three minutes. This 125 page report that we did and released last month. So I wanted to get right back to the conversation and just talk for a second about some of the facts and figures we have. There are lots of them. I'm happy to discuss more of them later. I wanted to put a few up on the screen for your benefit. Now what I've learned from Chairman Pye is that there's really no way to start a presentation about technology issues without some kind of quasi-clever and semi-inappropriate pop culture reference. So Shakespeare's Julius Caesar has been in the news a lot lately. And so I come to bury the ISP, industry-wide investment metric, not to praise it. I promise. But we have to spend some time on this aggregate number because it has been very much in the debate here in DC although perhaps not escaping outside of that. And this would be the first slide for those who read some of those 125 pages, the first figure in our report release last month. And what it shows is that aggregate investment across the publicly-traded ISPs were focusing on those because those are the ones we can track and whose numbers and whose own stories we can tell using their disclosures to investors, exactly the kind of thing that IA had in their video. What did they tell their investors and what did they report out to the Securities and Exchange Commission? And as you can see, hopefully, if you went down there in the bottom corner, investment was actually up for the two-year period following the reclassification vote. So we show a 5.3% increase in the 2014, excuse me, 2015 and 2016 time period after the vote and 2013 and 2014 were the two years before that. So that's why we're examining it in two-year chunks. Our total is based on this publicly-reported information. The only adjustments we make to it are to account appropriately for things like AT&T buying direct TV or charter merging with Time Warner Cable and Brighthouse. There's been a real spending spree from some of these companies lately, a company called Altice, but Cable did it in a sudden length. Lots of companies buying each other out. It's the analysts on the other side though who've gotten much more creative with their accounting and in trying to argue about the aggregate investment by knocking out certain kinds of investments or certain investments by certain companies. A lot of this is focused on AT&T and Sprint and we'll have a lot more to say about AT&T in just a minute. But the Sprint issue is a little bit easier to describe. I don't wanna get too much into it, but it's not really an accounting change. There are claims that Sprint is doing something different and it's merely an accounting change when in fact we see Sprint having invested a lot more capital for a while. AT&T, there's a cluster and I do mean a cluster of issues and sometimes contradictory claim around things like how to account for their acquisition of direct TV and also about what is in reality a tiny fraction of their investment that is now going to Mexico. So we can talk more about that if Noah has questions or others have questions later. But there are several reasons to move beyond this aggregate investment metric and that's because in the end it's really not all that informative. For example, if you knock out AT&T and Sprint and we haven't done that here but if you take them out of the equation we actually see a 9% increase for the rest of the industry. So that just shows how the aggregate number is subject to if not outright manipulation than being swamped by changes at a few big companies. What we think is important is to look at the individual company results and what that tells us. And what it tells us is there is no consistent dampening effect or really any kind of effect from Title II on the ISP on an industry-wide basis. Individual company results vary based on a number of factors. And so we looked at the aggregate numbers, we took it seriously, we did it as diligently as we could but we didn't stop there. If you notice in the chart on the right side in the column where we see the percent change for each of the individual companies there are a lot that are green and there are a few that are red. And the green ones were the ones that went up in that two year time period following the FCC's return to Title II. The relatively few number that are red are the ones who decreased in that time period. And here's a slightly different visualization of that to try to look at individual company results. You know, the inputs to that aggregate number are what's really important and what tells the real story. So as you can see, this is a slightly different timeframe and a slightly different take on it. But we have more of what I sometimes heard referred to in watching stock market reports as more winners than losers. More companies investing more after the FCC's vote and only a handful of companies reducing their investment. And so if there really were some kind of industry-wide dampening effect or any effect from Title II, and I think Libby hit the nail on the head, it's not like this has been shown or proven. I mean, the best that you see is people saying, well, something's gotta be happening. You know, where there's smoke, there's fire and they don't really wanna go so far as to say that they can show that Title II is the reason for any change in the industry-wide number. But the companies themselves don't make any claim about Title II. And nobody's really offered any mechanism or suggestion as Libby was pointing out as to why that would happen. Even if there were some theory about that, we can see that more companies went up than went down. And so what I'd like to sometimes ask, it's in trying to make sense of this kind of picture, is what do AT&T or CenturyLink know about this supposed massive dampening effect from Title II that Comcast or T-Mobile or even a smaller company like Cincinnati Bell up there at the top, what are they too stupid to figure out? I would submit the answer is nothing. They haven't not figured it out. The reason we see individual variations in the companies is that companies invest or don't invest for lots of reasons. Regulation is perhaps among them, but it's really just a pretty small factor in the grander scheme of things. Companies invest based not just on regulation, but based on demand for their services. They invest if there's competition and somebody else trying to meet that demand. They look at things like tax policy and interest rates and depreciation allowances and all these other things that are far outside the FCC's control, perhaps far outside anybody's control. But that really play a role in determining when and where they invest. And so what that means is that companies build out over time. It's a highly capital intensive industry. There's a lot of money that goes into the ground quite literally when they're building out their networks. But once they have built out a network or upgraded it, they don't need to then rebuild it the next year or more to the point in this conversation. They don't need to spend exactly the same money the next year. So quickly through a couple more slides and I have some others that we might get to if we have questions about it, but this shows you what these companies are getting for those investments, right? Sorry for the whiplash, but there's more companies investing more. Some companies investing less. You might notice on this next slide that the companies that invested less are up there too. AT&T, I'll go back to them yet one more time and we'll come back to them as I close in a second. AT&T extends lead in one gigabit per second deployments. Comcast deploying gigabit fiber in twice as many places as Google fiber was being deployed. Overall, table capital expenditure is increasing. The important thing to remember here is it's not just about how much money is being spent. Only in Washington and in these circles would people think that the raw dollar amount was somehow the most important thing because I don't think in very many board rooms people sit around and say, how can we spend as much money as possible? They say, how can we spend as little money as possible and yet improve our performance and improve our position in the market? And so we see as Noah and others alluded, increases in speeds and increases in the performance that people are getting from their broadband networks even when sometimes those individual ISPs are investing less. That's an efficiency game, that's a good thing and that's exactly what AT&T for the last time was curling about at the end of 2015. This is similar to and perhaps not as pissy as the IA version because I'm not gonna make you read all that or read all that myself. I could perhaps match the robotic voice of the guys on the investor calls but I'll try not to. This is Randall Stevenson in December of 2015 at the UBS Investor Conference and he's explaining why AT&T's investment was down. You know, there really is no big mystery here in the end. It's not how could this possibly have happened? It must have been Title II or some kind of regulation. No, what AT&T did was they announced a big upgrade in 2012. They finished it ahead of schedule in 2014 and in 2015 you have Randall Stevenson saying, this was a monster of all years for us in 2014. Our investment is down and there is, I think one of my favorite phrases on here, there is a downward bias on our capital expenditures, not from regulation but because AT&T invested and they were now reaping the rewards of that investment. So a few other phrases that leap out at me here. We're done with LPE, LPE is about 40% cheaper rather than laying up P1s and DS1s just to get really wonky for Libby. Talk about telecom infrastructure. We're laying up Ethernet. Capital requirements of Ethernet versus the P1, about 40% lower. So once again, faster technology, better facilities can in fact be cheaper and AT&T can increase speeds even when they're spending less money. That sounds like a good business proposition to me. I don't work for these companies anymore. I used to work in lock firms on their behalf but they are actually increasing their performance, increasing their speeds while spending less on many occasions. And that's a good story. That is showing that there is no overall dampening effect from Title II on investment but in fact that companies spend for a variety of reasons. And we should be thinking about what they spend on and what results they get, not just on the raw dollars at the industry wide level or even at the individual IFP level. So I can stop there. I have a couple more that I'll just put this one up for a second. The second panel today is all about the investment on the edge and this is what IA is talking about and what the panelists are from later are talking about. The ISPs are probably not even half the story but they are one side of the story and so we care about their health, we care about the broadband economy and the investment in it but we also care about what people do with those internet connections once they're built out and that's where we see this kind of growth in light of the certainty from Title II and from strong that neutrality rule. So I have gone on more than long enough I'm sure but happy to take questions and talk about other facts and figures in that voluminous report and to talk more about the edge as well as we lead into the second panel and hear what people are doing with this technology if not just with those who build it or spend it. Thank you very much. So Chris, you in your capacity as Chief Economist at the Internet Association have also taken a look and what are the top line findings of your research? Typically I don't like to start with something like this, a panel or a lecture with a quote but Libby actually some of the things you mentioned kind of triggered something in my mind is a quote from Alfred Knopf who said that an economist puts the simple things into the terms of the incomprehensible basically makes things way too complicated. There's three things to remember from the economic story of net neutrality. The first regarding the evidence, the vast majority of studies that have been done on the economics of the investment side of net neutrality are over a decade old and they're purely theoretical. So there is no history of empirical work to draw upon which brings us to the modern day debate right now. Where do you actually draw out numbers? The empirical analysis work such as math work and pre-presses work. Within that you need to remember that investment is not an end in of itself. Investment is a metric that we try to use to gauge the health of the ISP or broadband industry right? I have struggled for months to find any metric of any kind to indicate some type of harm as a result of net neutrality on the ISP market and it just does not exist. Nothing I can find. Investment is up, aggregate, average, econometric modeling doesn't show anything. Even I was looking at it this morning, employment in line installers for telecom infrastructure has gone up by 1% since 2015, 2015 to 2016. Across the board it's a healthy picture. And then the second, the third point, right? The other important aspect to remember is that we're talking about the economy more broadly. This isn't isolated to ISP investment or even the broadband market overall. What we're talking about is whether or not net neutrality is having any type of adverse effect on the economy. And really the opposite is true. Net neutrality rules are precisely what's helping out startups, precisely what's helping out new innovation. And this is particularly important in a time when you have very low dynamism in the U.S. small business pool. Companies are not starting up the way that they used to across industries. They are in the edge context. And we need to maintain that and nurture that and that neutrality rules do that. Yeah, that's right. So when you're looking at the entire ecosystem and not just the investment at the broadband companies, are you seeing anything? Is there anything at all, Matt, if you guys found anything that would indicate that net neutrality is somehow harming the internet ecosystem on the whole? No, I mean just the contrary. And that's that final slide. Maybe we can throw that up one more time if people don't mind me. Putting up something, but we are seeing massive increases in investment in the edge. And that's really what we would expect in light of the FTC adopting these rules that prevent unreasonable discrimination online. So here we go, I can do this, look at that magic. Those are just some of the facts and figures. I won't repeat them all for you, but we looked at things like the online video space, which is not the only thing we care about by any stretch. And in fact, at free press I'm happy to say able to say we don't care about these companies' results for their own sake, we care about the users' experience. And whether individual internet users can save money and have greater choices and greater diversity of options available to them, thanks to the explosion in over the top internet service, sorry, internet video. What we saw is not just an increase in the expenditures by companies like Amazon and Netflix and Hulu and some of the household names really what people would think of as the main online video providers perhaps up to this point. But what we see is the growth and really the birth of an entirely new industry. The tag we use for it in the report is virtual service providers. You might think of this as online cable operators, if that makes any sense. People who are not coming in, as Netflix has sometimes done and said, we are here as a compliment to your cable. You know, watch ESPN, watch HBO, but pay us as well. No, these new offerings are really designed to be cord cutting cable TV replacements. And so it's not just new startups, it's not just those big companies, it's actually the ISPs themselves. AT&T and Direct TV yet again, starring here in a future role. AT&T is offering Direct TV now to customers not just of its own ISP, not just to its own wireless and wireless subscribers, but to people who have other carriers. And that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. You know, this really goes back to Ed Whitaker in 2005 and that era of SPC and AT&T. They can't use my pipes for free. Well, that's a strange way to think about it. But what this shows is that people will pay for broadband if they can actually have more video content and more choices across the board available to them. And that industry didn't even exist a year ago. And here we see massive increase in the number of people providing it and the number of subscribers who are exercising that option. And to live you to your point that this discussion has to be more than just a bunch of competing science experiments. And that kind of misses the overall point that net neutrality is about consumer choice and protecting the consumers right to access whatever content they want. What are you seeing in the discussion and in terms of the public's interest in this topic and where they are positionally on this? Where the customers are. Right, I mean I don't think it's any different this time around in that most people, customers are in favor of net neutrality. If you ask them about it, I don't think it's a thing that you would immediately think of, you wouldn't assume that your ISP would want to limit your access to other websites. But if you ask people then they're like, no, of course, that sounds terrible. But I mean, just one metric that I think is great is if you go and look at, for example, Comcast's tweet. I mean, any time they tweet anything, obviously, they have a ton of mentions saying how terrible they are, because everyone hates them. But if they tweet about net neutrality, which they have done a couple of times, at least a couple of months ago they were sort of dipping their toe into posting some tweets about how net neutrality is entitled to and stuff. No one is convinced by that stuff. And I don't think that's really aimed at the public at large anyway. I think that's aimed at people in DC. But I think we'll see when the day of action comes up in July, and when this is really put right in front of people's faces, I think that's when we might start to see a more sort of activated public. Although, as Bruce was saying, 5 million comments, it's not like the public isn't activated on this issue. You have to remember that a lot of other stuff going on in DC as well. That's right. And Chris, so when you're looking at the ecosystem at large, you mentioned a couple of the other metrics, like installers and whatnot, but also you had mentioned on our prep call the notion that you can easily discern the health of the broadband industry by looking at their own data and their own metrics without applying any analysis to that. So do you want to give a quick review of that? So there's, I would argue that there's two sources you should be looking at when you're talking about metrics for this. The first is respected public institutions, Department of Commerce, Bureau of Economic Analysis, Bureau of Labor Statistics, things like that. And also the, I guess I use the term broadband industry itself, if you go to their website, they have a series of data points, capacity, sorry, broadband speed has doubled in the last year. Broadband penetration rates are up, broadband customer subscriptions are up, fiber penetration rates are up. These things are reflected in aggregate figures as well from the OECD, from US government sources as well. So across the board, we're seeing a variety of different metrics, right? Proxies for the health of the industry, all showing the same thing. And that includes direct investment numbers as well. These are not just corollaries, we're looking directly at things like cable and broadband investment or telecommunications investment. Across the board, aggregate figures are up. There's no statistical evidence that there's any impact from that neutrality from 2015 ruling. We've also looked at a bunch of other like background context as well. I really think that's an important point to emphasize, we've talked about it a few times, but let's imagine an industry where the spending is going down, which is not the case here, but someone argued that it has. But yet speeds are going up and profits are going up and their subscriber numbers are going up. The last part I would worry about as a consumer advocate for the most part is our price is coming down for users. That part of the equation, I don't think we've quite hit and gotten right, but for the companies themselves thinking about the ISPs, let's say they're spending less and yet their speeds are going up and their profits are going up and their revenues are going up and their subscriber numbers are going up. That sounds like a pretty good business to be in. Yesterday, I was Craig Moffat who's a longtime cable analyst saying, it's really no secret. Cables are pretty profitable business and that's what the numbers reflect is that these companies invest when they need to. They don't always need to because they don't always face enough competition. But in general, the technology's gotten better and their performance has gotten better across the board as Chris was documenting. And it's well, it's not a full picture on the prices. If you look at production prices, PPI's from the industry, they're both for wireless and wired. It's below the first year. One is below, the wireless is below 2000 levels currently and the other one's below 1996 levels for wired, right? So they're below, they're historically low. They're lower than their first year of observation that's available in the data itself. Some have argued that net neutrality is anti-competitive that it restricts a company's ability to kind of operate in whatever way they see fit. Matt, do you wanna talk for a minute about competition in the internet sector and how net neutrality could really be looked at as a pro-competitive policy? Yeah, sure. I mean, I would look at it not strictly through a competition lens, but that is an important point. When you don't have many choices of how to get online, to then have one of those options say, well, we're gonna innovate a little bit and block some of your websites that you wanted to visit. Is that okay with you? Trust us, it's in your best interest. I think most people's answer would be no, we don't really have enough choices. There are not enough routes to route around that. But I would say, and this is what I mean about not looking at it strictly through a competition lens, even though I think that's a very valuable one, is that these companies are carriers. That's the legal definition that we argued about a lot in the court case. And so I often think about the cell phone industry and yes, I do mean phones, wireless voice, something that people are used to and maybe using less of now than they once did, but there we do have most people at least three, four, five options, let's say. And that's not wildly competitive. It might not even be effectively competitive. They're resort to FCC parlance for a second, but you do have some choices. And yet I don't think people would put up with that notion. Well, AT&T is gonna block phone calls to certain numbers because hey, you could always switch to T-Mobile. Like no, that's not what these companies do. Carriers are there to carry our traffic, carry our speech, carry content. Yes, AT&T, Verizon, Comcast quite obviously can themselves be internet providers, internet content providers. They can have video offerings and other services that ride over the tops of those networks, but when they are serving their customers and serving as a broadband carrier, they shouldn't be making those kinds of choices for us, whether there's only one option in town or even if you have the absolute luxury of having two or three options or four or five wireless options. Just let me do one at anything. That's absolutely right. And going back to consumers and what they want, I really don't think any consumers were clamoring. Like, I love my ISP. I just wish that it would block some websites that I want to visit. That's not something that anyone is really after. And I think there's a reason that a lot of people really don't like their ISPs. Comcast and Time Warner famously among the least popular companies in America, and that's partly because they don't have the incentive to provide a good service because most people don't have a choice of ISP, that's like a pretty basic economic point. Or rather, most people only have a choice of one or two ISPs. And that has a number of effects, like it raises prices. And I mean, they don't have to try so hard on customer service, which everyone famously hates. So, yeah, I mean, I think that's absolutely okay. And we're looking at the flip side of the competition, so maybe from the edge standpoint. I mean, you just look to the testimonials in our white paper. And that neutrality rules are integral to promoting competition among new startups, internet firms, software developers, any type of firm that is using an internet connection and may have a slightly, you know, need to do something more than just accessing email. And again, I mentioned this in kind of an opening remarks. When you're looking at potential for, you know, US economy, potential for small businesses and where you can help, where competition is needed, you need it in those dynamic industries, such as, you know, I guess, quote-unquote edge providers. That's where economic value is coming from today and going forward. It seems also in the discussion, this is a little off topic from the investment discussion, but it seems also that there, Libby, that there is a change in definition about what net neutrality means over time and very slowly. So here at the Internet Association, we believe that net neutrality means that there is no blocking. You have a ban on pay prioritization, a ban on throttling, that the rules also apply to mobile, that they're strong and enforceable and legally sustainable. And that appears to be shifting, you know, the ISP side of the equation. So I was wondering, Libby, if you wanted to chat for a couple of seconds about that. Yeah, I mean, I think that's absolutely part of the strategy and has been since the beginning is to say net neutrality isn't Title II. We only dislike Title II. You know, we love net neutrality. When, obviously, then the question is, well, if you love net neutrality so much, why are you trying to get rid of the rules that allow it to exist? And, you know, when you then start talking about issues like blocking and pay prioritization, I think it's very telling that in the NPRM, there weren't any specifics about that. It was, you know, we're going to take comment on what we should do about blocking and pay prioritization so that, you know, that blow doesn't land immediately because if opponents were able to frame the debate, there's, oh, look, they want to block content. They want to do pay prioritization. Then, you know, that would be a much harder argument to make. But, you know, again, I don't think, you know, most Americans don't know what net neutrality, well, a lot of Americans don't know what net neutrality is. They certainly don't know what Title II is. So, if you send out a tweet saying, we love net neutrality, we just don't love Title II, then that's not, that's not as obviously a lie as saying net neutrality is bad. And I think the way that the shifting rhetoric goes over time is not just in the legal foundation and framework discussions, which are important, but also in what they say about the rules themselves that are built on that foundation. What I mean by that, we could probably do a whole series of videos with yellow highlighter showing contradictions and comments then and now. Back in the 2014 cycle, the last time we were fighting quite so hard about this, most of, maybe I'd even say all of the big ISPs were saying, we don't want inflexible rules. I mean, I think we saw it in the Verizon case. They talked about inflexible rules, that would dampen investment. What we want is flexible, case by case, enforcement of standards by the FCC with discretion to decide when prioritization is harmful and when it might not be. Well, as soon as we got to Title II and to the recognition that that would be the legal framework for the rules, they did a complete 180. They said, what do you mean? We love rules. We can't have these standards with the FCC granted all this discretion to kind of come in and muck things up. And so they focused a lot of their complaints then on what's called the general conduct rule in the 2015 net neutrality order. So, I mean, that is, I'm not helping to get outside the wonky bubble that Libya's right to call us out for, but even when you look at the rules themselves and how the companies argue, it's not just do we love net neutrality or not and do we love Title II of the Communications Act, but even the ways they argue about it can be a complete contradiction in the span of a couple months based on some change and some calculation they've made. Yeah, I mean, I would add to that that with net neutrality as with most issues, what can you expect big corporations to do? You can expect them to fight regulation. Not in every case and they're not always gonna fight regulation as a whole. They're gonna fight regulations that they don't like, but this is basically an anti-regulation argument. And I think, honestly, I've heard this from a few people that they're not as upset about things like blocking and pay prioritization because those aren't gonna be difficult things to sell to customers if they do them, which I expect they would do anyway. But they really just don't like it and they don't wanna be regulated at all. And when you're a company as big as Comcast or as big as Verizon and have the amount of money that you have to spend on lobbying, then you might as well sink it into fighting regulation like that. And so coming back to the investment story, Chris, is there anything that you wanna add of closing thought before we go to audience questions? So the debate itself, right? We're working with a small amount of empirical analysis. And I think that it's important for everyone to remember when you're going through the numbers and getting into the weeds that you wanna look at a range of metrics. So including for the investment argumentation on either side, right? One figure from one researcher or one figure from one organization does not make a full, I guess you determine case, right? It certainly doesn't prove anything from a mathematical standpoint. So what you need to do is look at a variety of figures. You need to look from the industry itself from respected sources. You need to look at a variety of ways of analyzing that data. And when you do that, the story is really quite clear. There is no investment story. It's, the industry is doing well for all accounts that I can see. I mean, I took so much of your time at the beginning. I don't think there's much more to say than that. We think our numbers are good. So I appreciate what Chris is saying, you know? But we also looked at Census Bureau numbers. We looked at the industry numbers and NCTA, basically contradicting what they've said down here on that, but also just on how people talk about what that neutrality is, whether they think the internet's a utility or not. These companies can tell a very different story on Wall Street and on K Street. And as you pointed out, they are, it's not that they have no legal obligations when they're lobbying and going to the FCC, but they tell their investors that investment is good and that they're doing well. And that's not just because they want to paint a rosy picture for their shareholders, but because they are legally obligated to tell the truth when they go into those kinds of rooms and get on those kinds of investor calls. If you're taking individual companies, don't look at numbers from a randomly selected group of companies. Look across the industry. Look at all publicly traded companies. Look at industry-wide figures. That's where the actual data are. Yeah, I mean, to touch on that, in our report, we have about 50 pages of the individual company narrative. So that is, again, not just the numbers and the dollars they're putting out, but also them explaining why they're doing it and where they're doing it. So again, even some of the companies that went down are actually accelerating their deployment. Altice is a good example of this. Their investment dipped, again, for kind of, I wouldn't say anomalous reasons, but because of where they were in their investment cycle. But they announced that they would be launching a five-year, five-or-to-the-home sort of complete build-out and rebuild of their entire system as Altice acquired two different table companies, tables that had a pretty significant footprint each. So that was after the vote. They said, you know, table's good. Table actually does far better than copper does. So table's done a great job beating DSL. And DSL is, if not a thing of the past, in every neighborhood, has been losing subscribers. And what did Altice do? They said, we have a winning formula. We have a table plant. But when we're going up against Verizon and we're facing Fios, we are ourselves going to build out fiber-to-the-home. And that's still on the horizon for them. So again, it really is a, I would say it's a more complicated picture in some ways. I think that lines up with what Chris was saying about how there is no kind of definitive case or number you can point to and say, aha, there's the answer. But most of the numbers and most of the stories paint a pretty good picture for the ISP, at least in terms of how they're doing, even if their subscribers aren't always reaping the benefits of that that we would like to see. Yeah, and I think that the broader takeaway is that you also just can't look to what's happening with the ISPs, that you have to look to the whole ecosystem to understand what the economic impact of broadband investment is ultimately. Libby, do you want to add some closing remarks before we open the mic? No, just on that point, I think that's a good point. You do have to look at the whole ecosystem and that's again why this is a slightly easier lift for ISPs because it is really, really hard to tease out the effects of a rule on things like investment. And it's a much harder argument to say, well, look at the broader picture and look at all of these different factors than for them to say, look, look, our investment's down and we have this number that says so, right there, it's right there. So I think you are absolutely right. The internet is embedded in our lives in all ways and to try and sort of quantify the benefits of that is very difficult, but it is also, just happened to be true. So we have that on our side. We've gotten those questions from Capitol Hill, can't you just tell us what the value of the internet is? Like, probably not very reliably, I'll defer to Chris on that. It's a hard thing to do, but it's basically everybody else. I have to say this all the time, but what, 99.9 something percent of businesses buy internet access, they don't sell it. So if we focus only on that important but relatively small number that sell it, we're really missing most of the picture. Right, and it's also, it's art and music and social life and everything. It's not just, not everything has, honestly not everything has to be about whether something is making a profit or not. Great, with that, we'll take audience questions to the extent that you have it. Thank you. My name is Dalton Booker. I'm representing the Osgoode Institute for International Studies, and my question is this. So this is maybe slightly off topic, but obviously you can't have net neutrality if each city has only one or if that internet provider. So I was wondering if you guys would share some of your thoughts on the idea of providing co-ops, like publicly held co-ops or municipal fiber service providers as well as the, as recently discussed and at the Senate hearing this morning the Winchester plan that the township of Winchester and Maryland put forward to and their relatively effective public-private partnership that spread fiber through their city. Well, I'll take a stab at reframing this. So first I would say that, because there's very little competition at the point of connection to the internet and Matt maybe you wanna take this, that is the reason why you need net neutrality because the switching costs are very high if you have the ability to switch at all. And secondly, I guess the question was, is more competition at the point of connection a good thing? The one word answer to the second part of that is an easy one, yes. It would be, I really, it's a great question. I don't mean to pick on it, but I think I would, kind of like I did with Noah's question about competition, reframe it slightly and say, you need net neutrality whether there's one provider or more than one. If I have a carrier that I'm using to communicate with the world, and I love the way Libby brought us all back to not focusing strictly on dollar signs. You need to have it if there's one or if there's more than one, but to your question about municipal efforts, cooperative efforts, that's something that we and OTI are hosts here. And a lot of companies and a lot of communities and a lot of interest groups have fought for. That's a whole separate can of worms on the economic side about the investments and public financing and public-private partnerships. But we definitely think that more choices are better and that giving communities that decision to make for themselves, letting them decide and not having the state legislature or the FCC for that matter, make the decision for them is the right way to go. Yeah, and we at the internet organization also support abundant broadband for it, so. Chris, anything you'd like to add on that? And what you said earlier, more investment is good. We're not arguing against more invested, right? So I wanna get, I don't know the specifics on the one town that you mentioned, but if you can bring in more broadband investment and protect competition from that neutrality, it's a good thing. Yeah, I mean, I would also say that it's very telling if you look at how ISPs approach competition, especially when it comes to things like municipal broadband and electricity co-ops providing broadband. If you think that they really care about competition if the argument is that net neutrality harms competition, then you should look at how they approach immunity broadband and electric co-ops because they hate those and they fight to the nail to kill them and it's not just immunity broadband as well, things like Google Fiber, AT&T with the OneTouch make ready policy. They really hate that stuff and that's what businesses do. That's what they pay lobbyists for is to fight laws and developments that might harm their business position. One of those things is competition. It's just inevitable. Great, thank you, Mike. Anybody else? I used to be a nerd back at the age of mainframes in COBOL if anybody is familiar with those things. Now I'm just a confused old man. So I probably ask questions that most of the people in the room already know the answers to and I apologize for that, but I'm trying to understand what the non-neutral world is going to be like. When you talk about blocking, you're saying a URLs will be blocked, will not be serviced by providers, so that when you type in a URL it'll say not found or sorry or something like that. What did you want to say? I mean, I would probably like actually defer to Matt on the specific technical questions about this stuff, but I mean, the point of the net neutrality rules as they are in force right now is to prevent that kind of blocking or pay prioritization where companies could pay ISPs to prioritize traffic to their websites over other websites. Could you pay to unblock your site as well? I mean, I guess. Yeah, I mean, so I'm trying to be really brief here, but happy to talk more about it too. There are ways that they could change things that would be harder to see, more in the guts of the network, as I sometimes refer to it, because I'm not an engineer or an economist, the guts, I'm sure that's the technical term that you're familiar with from your days. So not everything would necessarily be as apparent to the person on the surface, and what we saw in 2014 was just things like streaming services just not working very well and you'd call the ISP and they'd say, maybe you should pay us more money and buy more speed. Oh, I did and it still didn't work, so there are things that wouldn't be quite so obvious, but what you'd probably be most likely to see in the scenario you're describing, which is a little bit harder to imagine, but not impossible is, sometimes people refer to this as the cableization of the internet. Oh, you want to go to Facebook to you? Well, that's only available on our social media tier, which is available to you from your $5 more per month. That's the kind of thing, most of their efforts have been focused on the edge providers and trying to get more money out of the pockets of those companies, but they could also face their customers and say, your choices are limited unless you pay us more. Does the industry at all make the argument that if they aren't allowed to soak the people who can afford to pay for it for privatization or whatever, that that would mean the costs would have to be distributed equally amongst the consumers, which would cause a higher cost to the average consumer, which might price poorer people, right? It's not a question of having a slow internet, but no internet at all, because they couldn't afford it. Do they make that argument at all? And does it have any, hold any water? It doesn't hold much water, and I don't want to give space to Chris, but what they do already is they do differentiate their prices based on speed. So it's not a perfect proxy, but you can buy less speed or more speed, and what has sometimes been claimed is that, well, if you let us discriminate on top of that, we can charge even more for people who want to go see video and we'll pass those savings onto the customers. We don't think that holds water. That's kind of a trickle-down theory that says if you let them charge more to company X over here, then person Y will save money on their monthly bill. And the companies are allowed to discriminate in that sense to sell faster speed tiers to different customers, but they're not allowed to then pick and choose which websites they can go to. I think also you could look to something that they've floated in the past on privacy, which is the idea of sort of tiered privacy plans. And, you know, because obviously there was a couple months ago about the broadband privacy law and basically whether or not your internet service provider will be able to sell data about your browsing history and other various aggregated data about what you do online. And in the past, certain companies have floated the idea of charging people different amounts of money depending on whether or not you allow them to sell your data. So if they're willing to do that with privacy, I wouldn't be surprised if they were willing to charge different amounts and yet we try with the purposes. Back to the economic investment rationale. So the idea is that if we can't do that, if we can't put in a package that requires you to pay more to access Facebook, there's gonna be three issues, right? And these are again, 10 year old theoretical arguments that have not been shown in the data that actually happened. There'd be one around, well, we have less incentive to invest because it's not valuable for us. Two, our capacity will have issues with that and they'll be bottlenecking. And three, it will end up either reducing revenues or increasing costs as a result. Across those three kind of sub-components of that investment argumentation, there is no evidence of it. Investment is up from 2015 up since 2010. Capacity data production has increased exponentially since 2007, 2008 and there's been no issue in terms of being able to handle it. And in terms of revenue and cost or prices, all of those are what revenues up and cost and prices are down. So that theoretical argumentation, that decades old theoretical argumentation doesn't hold. Yeah, and I think you're gonna hear a lot more about what the potential impact on paid prioritization could be on the edge. We issued a white paper this morning that features a bunch of testimonials from internet companies and SECO in the testimonial talks about the fact that milliseconds matter and that they know that if they're delivering content to a customer just millisecond slower than another customer, they're much more likely to lose a sale and so feed really matters in this instance. Rob, I'll tell you on your hand up. We're with Yaluva Finance. Has anyone done any studies of the compliance costs of the current rules so that people talk about what a burden it is but Ajeev Pahey's speech, he said that a bunch of small wireless providers whom ours technicus John Brod can actually talk to and these guys were just afraid that they'd have to, they had no idea what the costs were gonna be. Yes and no. I think there was a lot of discussion at that level especially around the transparency rules as far as what it would cost for ISPs. We actually, it wasn't the only place to talk about this but we actually were part of that proceeding although towards the very tail end of it. And we noticed that the wireless ISPs were claiming something like two hours of compliance work a month and somebody else said no it's 20 hours a month and so there was a real discrepancy even when they named numbers which wasn't very often. And so I know one of the criticisms that's been leveled at us is well you're looking at these publicly traded ISPs which are mostly big but there are some smaller ones too including providers in Alaska and other rural territories that are more sparsely populated. What about the small guys? What about the small ISPs? There was a letter that was put into the docket a month or so ago I don't think it had any numbers in it and so I just think it's the same kind of story that these guys showed in their video. It's easy to claim cost burdens. It's harder to show those especially when you have to name a number and do so on penalty of perjury. So I don't think anybody has done a credible study on that. And a lot of the fight around that issue was centered around the paperwork reduction compliance. The FCC has to say well it's a major rule and so it'll cost about a hundred million dollars. You know I think that's kind of boilerplate. So I don't know that they dug in enough. I'm not really criticizing them for not doing so but I don't think even the FCC's own numbers got to that level of granularity. Yeah, Don Evans from Fletcher, Hilton, Hildreth. I had a quick observation and then a question for you. The observation was I was at a a Free State Foundation function about a month ago when there were executives from Comcast and AT&T there. And the guy from Comcast insisted that whenever he's in an investment meeting where they're considering a major investment that they all slap their heads and ring their hands and say oh my god this is now subject to Title II regulation should we make the investment or not. And I really found that kind of ridiculous actually. And I felt like telling him ask the AT&T guy that's on the panel about their investment in cellular radio which has been subject to very light Title II regulation for more than 30 years and ask him if they slap their head and ring their hands whenever they wanna make an investment on the grounds that oh my god it's subject to Title II and is that gonna impede our profits. My question though is looking at the numbers that you guys have been talking about here. Is it possible that the internet is just such a dynamic force and a dynamic economic power that maybe none of this makes any difference. Maybe the investment that we had before there was net neutrality rules and whether they're taken away now will really make no difference. People would just do what the internet demands that they do in order to provide services to the public. I mean it's the theoretical right. Can we make the argument that without net neutrality the internet sector is going to halt. I think that it's useful to look at it from maybe perspective of different companies. So if you're taking a large internet firm, edge provider, they have capital on hand, they have a large number of divisions and people working and thinking on issues. But what's really important are those medium small firms and then those startups that are yet to start. So if you come up with a new business idea and you need to start it by your personal computer in your garage or in your office and then you have to pay for extra capacity and speed and you have to pay to not have things rottled because you put load up too much content and you have all these additional costs going on for a startup that's being funded out of your life savings or out of a significant portion of your paycheck because you cut back as you believe in it. That's where the impact is going to come in right. So if net neutrality was taken away are the largest companies in the internet going to go away in a couple of years? Probably not. But are we going to have that same wave of innovation? And that's where I would argue that you would not have that same type of dynamism. We see this in other sectors of the economy that have struggled with other issues. So not regulation specific and not internet specific ISP or EDGE but then apply that into an area that is doing well. I think that's the trouble to the component. I think your two points together are really powerful. I mean, do they think about regulation? Well, sure. Does it have some impact on their investment decisions? Obviously. But is it a driver of those decisions all by itself or is it really something they can put a number on and say we've decided not to invest here because oh my goodness title two might do something bad to us someday? No, that's not what we're seeing and it's not proven out in the numbers. And is the internet so dynamic that it doesn't need any kind of ground rules? I would say no. But it is going to continue to develop and flourish because as I said before, that's what companies based their decisions on based on demand and competition and interest rates and tax policy and depreciate all these other factors. If not vastly more important than regulation all by its lonesome, we would think certainly more important for that kind of calculation in those boardrooms. And also I think that's why you always need to pair these discussions about investment and economics and stuff with the question of whether it's a good regulation because yeah, it would be a shame if companies lost business or investment went down because of a really bad regulation that didn't even help people. But yeah, I mean sometimes, I'm not saying that's the case in this case. Clearly it's not but sometimes regulations cost money. I'm sure it would be really cheap for Oscar Mayer to not have to check the bacon for E. Coli or whatever. But we need that to happen. So we tell them to suck up the cost and they do and then that's good. It's not exactly the same here but clearly the same principle of life. Is the regulation good? Is it worth any money in this case? It also happens to not even cost any money. So what are we doing? Yeah, I mean, I think it's hard to imagine that should net neutrality rules go away or the overhang of future rules go away that the internet would look exactly the same tomorrow as it does today. And the things that you love about the internet today are likely the fact that the barriers to entry to low, that innovation is extremely high, that competition is a click of way, that you don't have to get by a bundle of websites from your ISP that's also tied to having to use this landline. And so it might not happen tomorrow but certainly net neutrality is an important principle that has been the foundation of the free and open internet and something that the users and the internet companies believe in very strongly. Next question? Here in the front. Hi, I'm Max Malloy from Hamilton Place Strategies. I had a question going back to this sort of shifting definition of what net neutrality means in an environment where the ISPs are sort of making the argument that we don't need these rules, I think we'll be kind of talking about this. We would just do it ourselves because it's the right thing and because consumers want it. China, we were looking kind of back at how they define it and we noticed that back a couple of years ago it was all sort of the principles, I would say consistent with in general what a lot of the internet companies talk about, but now it feels like paid prioritization is not really featuring as much in their definition and it just sort of suddenly disappeared. And I was just wondering if that's something that others have noticed is in the conversations with ISPs, are they being questioned on that? It just feels like to this gentleman's point, I think for a lot of users, it's hard to imagine a world where people are blocking websites so I think that might limit some of the outcry that would otherwise happen but I just wonder if this paid prioritization point is if they're getting pressed on that. Yeah, well, I have pressed Comcast on this. A couple, I forgot, a few weeks ago they put up a series of blog posts about how they don't hit any charity they just pay title to and one of those included actually a GIP telling people that they would never or rather they don't slow throttle or block content. And so I emailed them and I was like, you say you don't do that but would you do that? And they replied and said that they would never do that which kind of surprised me because I was wanting to say that in the post. But first of all, I would say that they would probably hinge that on some kind of nuanced legal definition of what throttle content means. I'm sure that what they would end up doing is saying, no, no, no, we're not slowing your internet, we're just offering other people faster internet. And I think you're right that they would want to reframe what pay prioritization means in that case. But you know, and I think it's probably pretty easy for them to say, no, we're not gonna block websites because you're right, that would be kind of extreme and it would be a little crazy for AT&T to block access to Comcast website. It's probably not what they wanna do but they do probably wanna slow access especially as you look at companies like AT&T merging with other companies that provide content. That's where I think the real problem is, is if AT&T starts slowing down access to things that aren't direct TV, I can absolutely imagine that. Not throttling you, we're just managing somebody else. But I just wanted to say, I mean it kind of depends on how feisty they're feeling in the room that they're in. So sometimes you get like, we of course we like rules against paid prioritization and then they'll say, well of course we don't need rules but we would never do it anyway. But then you see Comcast again, kind of creeping back into the conversation saying, well we should only ban harmful forms of prioritization but maybe just maybe there's some non-harmful ones that would benefit people. And I think that goes back to this point about economics that they're really any business case to be made for that, maybe not but it doesn't mean they wouldn't like the freedom to try. That's in fact exactly what Verizon argued in the previous court case before the last time through when the FTC won. They said, but for these rules we would be exploring these kinds of arrangements and we would like to edit the internet. Period. Well with that, that's the perfect segue into our next panel. Thank you to OTI and everybody for coming and listening to us for the past hour. If you have any other questions we'll make ourselves available to you. So with that welcome Sarah Morris to the stage. And while we're switching around folks you need to stretch, shake your hands, get the blood flowing again now's the time. So yeah, so I'm really, I'm really excited to have this opportunity to have this opportunity to continue the conversation and maybe pivot a little bit as Libby said, this battle of the nerds I think was her term on the economic analysis of who's right about what ISPs are doing and how much they're investing. That's all, that is a conversation that is important to have, but it is only one small part of the conversation about net neutrality and the value of strong net neutrality rules and the effects that those rules have on not just internet company, internet service provider investment but on investment throughout the network. And these other non-economic or non-market effects that strong open internet rules provide. And so we have a great panel here to follow up on the debate of the nerds and hopefully bring this a little bit, you bring this back down to real life and talk a bit about what companies are experiencing as they navigate a world with the open internet order from 2015 in place, what it means for consumers, what it means for entrepreneurs and what this looks like on the ground. And so I will, I'm joined here today by Anika Navaroli, who is the senior campaign manager and media and economic justice at Color of Change, Michael Chia, who is the general counsel at Vimeo and Rachel Wolbers, policy director for engine advocacy. We're unfortunately not able to be joined by Julie Fisselstay, but I've got some, the remarks that Noah, the testimonial that Noah mentioned on the previous panel that's included in there in internet association report, I have that and may draw on that a little bit to hear from Etsy's really important perspective as well. But let's get started. And as a reminder for all of you who make it through this final hour, there are drinks for us on the other side and snacks, food as well. We'll do what we can to keep the energy up and leave time at the end for more audience questions and we look forward to you having a good conversation. So we heard a lot about investment in the network in the previous, who's investing in the infrastructure of the network itself? But I wanna start here now and talk about what's happening on the network. And I think a good place to do that is a little bit of introduction from each of you. What interests do you represent sitting up here on the stage and why is the open internet important to you, to your company or to your members more broadly? So, I don't know if any of you can kick it off, but. Sure, I'm happy to kick it off. So I work for Engine Advocacy and we are a think tank here in Washington, D.C. that represents the voice of startups. I just joined Engine about a month ago, but Engine has been around for five years and net neutrality was actually one of the first issues that we got involved in after SOPA PIPA. Very recently, a couple months ago, we wrote a letter to Chairman Pai in supporting the open internet rules and the 2015 open internet rules and we had a huge interest level from our startups. We had over 1,100 startups sign on to the letter and what I'm really proud of is that we had 1,100 startups from all 50 states. So we had startups in Alaska and Mississippi and Michigan and I think what really draws startups to this issue is because they know and create so much using the internet, you can't have a startup without it. Whether you are a app developer in San Francisco or a health and beauty startup in Grand Rapids, Michigan, like my mom, you're gonna need the internet to find new consumers, to manage global supply chains and when you're a startup, you rarely get a second chance because you have very little brand equity. So if your content is throttled or even a millisecond, consumers can be frustrated with that and they're just not gonna come back. It's not like you're Amazon and they're gonna continue to use your service. So it's so important for all startups to have these open internet rules in place to make sure that they have a fighting chance on a level playing field. Well, at Vimeo, we've been around for 12 years but we still consider ourselves very much a startup from one of the smaller video companies, even though we reach about 240 million people a month. Fix that. And we are interested in this issue, not only for... This is an issue that's not just important to us as a company that streams high bandwidth data for this video, but also for our users, 16 million registered users who are uploading a video or 800,000 paying subscribers who are trying to make a business from selling their video on the internet, trying to reach their customers, trying to explain what their business does, trying to become something with their IPs, their videos. And so, you'll use view ourselves as a platform to unleash that creativity. And so, without strong rules that prevent our content, our users' content from being troubled, some of those voices that might not otherwise get heard in the mess of what is media these days, we wanna make sure that everyone has the opportunity to get out there and be heard, at least have the chance to resonate with somebody. Thank you. So thank you so much. I'm very happy to be here. I heard that I work at Color of Change, and Color of Change is the nation's largest online racial justice organization. So I'm gonna take it a little bit back. Whoa, it's got loud, y'all. So hey, welcome again. So I'm gonna take it back to something that Kevin said at the very beginning of today in this afternoon. He said that net neutrality is a racial justice issue. And that's one of the phrases that we continue to use and one of the things that we really stand on. So I'm gonna take us again back to, let's talk about August 2014. How many of you all here, let's have a little august participation, have heard of Ferguson? Are you trying? Okay, how many of you heard of Mike Brown? Great. So the story of Ferguson and the story of Michael Brown started on Twitter. It started by the hashtag, hashtag Ferguson. And it took over one million tweets before CNN started covering that story. The power of net neutrality is, as you were saying, the power to tell our own story. It's the power to change the media narrative. It's the power to start a conversation about police accountability and racial justice like has never existed within this country. And along those lines, black folks and people of color are also some of the fastest adopters of technology in the United States. And because of that, we definitely want to make sure and we are fighting consistently to make sure that there is access, that there is equality online. And finally, one of the other reasons why I'm here is because one of the largest group of entrepreneurs that exists is black women. You don't hear that very much. We've been spending a lot of time talking about tech startups in a lot of different areas. Small businesses are being started by black women online. And those voices are important and they need to be heard and they need to provide. I will just add a little bit at this, I think, juncture from Etsy. This is from Etsy CEO who notes that Etsy hosts over 1.8 million active Etsy sellers in nearly every country around the world. In the US, 87% of the sellers on Etsy are women and most are sole proprietors working from home. Individually, they may be small, but together they sold $2.8 billion in goods last year alone. Platforms like Etsy create opportunities for anyone with a good idea to start a business online and access a global market of consumers. These are, there are Etsy sellers in every state and 28% of Etsy sellers live in rural areas compared to 17% of US non-farm business owners. For 32% of Etsy sellers, their creative business is their sole occupation. Josh Silverman goes on to note that as micro-businesses, internet fast lanes are more likely to be unaffordable undermining the ability of Etsy sellers to compete with bigger, more established brands. Again, we've heard this now three times, delays of just milliseconds negatively impact sales. That's why their community has thought of the FCC's 2015 Open Internet Order, which puts clear, bright lines, net neutrality rules into place. And so you can read the rest of the testimonial from Etsy and there's other testimonials from Vimeo and others, but I wanted to highlight that as we talked not just about the companies on the internet that are, like Zanika said, the startups that are trying to grow, but as we've all touched on, the unique entrepreneurs that use the internet as a platform for their own sales and economic livelihoods. So I promise I won't pretend to be Etsy for the rest of the panel because that would be a little weird and awkward, but I did want, since Julie was not able to be here, I wanted to make sure that voice was represented. So I wanna go back to, I sort of introduced the concept at the start of this conversation and then didn't really unpack it at all. So let's hoping we can kind of talk about it here. This idea of investment in the network itself versus the concept of investment on the network. And you've all touched on what investment on the network can look like, but putting this conversation to start into the broader, or the conversation we just had about ISP investment in their networks, why is it important for the FCC as it's considering what it's going to do next in terms of net neutrality to consider what's happening on the network, in addition to what's happening in terms of investment in the network. I would say that no one goes to the Apple Store to buy a wireless one. They're going there to buy the phone and all the things that come along with it. And so it's the innovation at the edge, which is the FCC term for content, the applications, the services, that is bringing people to the internet in the first place and is bringing people to the Apple Store, AT&T Store, what not, to buy those phones, to buy their plans, to buy those monthly unlimited, no caps plans. Just got a spam email from Time Warner just as we were sitting here saying, the fastest internet around 180 pps, no data caps. People aren't buying those in the abstract, they're buying them because they're streaming tons and tons of video, they're just buying them because they want to speak to their friends on FaceTime, they want to do things. And so you can't talk about the internet investment in the network in the abstract without talking about all the investment that goes on a day-to-day basis into the application services and content that's fueling the demand for that investment in infrastructure. So at this point of the abstract versus being concrete, we talk about investment even on the network in a pretty abstract way, this virtuous circle or cycle of innovation. But there are very real people for whom having strong net neutrality protections in place matters every day. So maybe Anika, if I could start with you, you talked about black women and the role that they play in the economy online in real life, if net neutrality goes away, what does that mean? Or what is the importance of net neutrality rules for those women? Yeah, absolutely. So as I said, Color of Change is the nation's largest online racial justice organization. We started by sending one single email. And this was 11 years ago in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. The email said Kanye was right, period. That was sent to, again, about 1,000 different people. Again, we can't use that hashtag anymore, we can't say that anymore because God only knows what Kanye is saying this week. So again, we're 11 years past that, but at that moment, Kanye had just got a national TV and said, George Bush doesn't care about black people. And it was true. And from that very inception, from the very single email that we were able to send, we were able to build a base that is currently now over one million members. That started because there was no cost to start up for us to send that email. There was nothing in the way of organizing. There was nothing stopping Color of Change from coming together and literally saying, no one cares about disappointing black people right now. So how do we raise our voices and make ourselves an absolutely unignorable opposition such that we can change this national conversation? We can make ourselves visible in a way that we never have been before. And so that's the origin story of the organization that works for Color of Change. And actually, I'm gonna pull out my phone because we're talking about the internet here. And I'm gonna read a couple of different things to you all. So Color of Change has been campaigning for net neutrality again for about 11 years now. And so we recently have started doing a little bit of story collection. We've been asking our members, why does net neutrality matter to you? So I'm gonna read a couple of these responses because these are the voices that need to be uplifted. These are the folks that we really care about and this is really what's going on on the ground. So bear with me as I read my tiny print with my glasses on. One person says, and I'm keeping names out of this just for privacy reasons. One person says, my tiny one business depends on all caps upon open internet with the level playing field for all of us. Second person says, because I use the internet for my small business and I don't wanna pay more than I currently am paying for speed, this could hurt my profits. Another person says it allows me to compete in my work and make it efficient and have it set down in such a timely manner since I oversee a nonprofit with our online communications and have my own small business. Another person says I'm an entrepreneur who relies on the internet for certain aspects of my business. Without net neutrality it could pose an even greater challenge to growing my business. Another individual says it allows more people the opportunity to start businesses, be heard and help others via funds and charity. Someone else says I have a small business and can't pay for fast access. Net neutrality is vitally important for a democracy so that people can get real information in real time and so that they can organize if they want to. One more person says net neutrality means I can keep up with what's going on in the world. It has allowed me to start a business, build a site, build clientele and keep up with my family. And finally, net neutrality provides a place for small business on a shoestring budget to market and promote their business. That's why net neutrality matters. And turning then to Michael and Rachel, I imagine that you've heard similar experiences from, or you've experienced this perhaps Michael is working with Mimeo and Rachel have seen this within your members and your organization as well. I think the reason it's really important to have these tools in place is that they provide certainty in the market place. So a lot of startups who are seeking venture capital investment or investment from friends and family, they want to make sure that what they're investing in isn't going to change every four years or with the next FCC. And so providing these clear rules of the road that allow fair and consistent rules is really important for investment and getting your company off the ground, as I mentioned earlier, you don't get a lot of second chances. And so you need to be doing it right the first time and having good rules in place is really important for that. I'm not an entrepreneur myself, but I'm returning, but to make good people who are looking at acquiring, to developers, work for our company who may want to go and start their own business some day, this is a good deal for them. They don't want to be in a world where they have to go see for themselves from an ISP in order to be successful. They're talking about why net neutrality is so important and in light of the conversation that started in the last panel about the narrative around the rules themselves changing, what people mean by net neutrality seems to shift a bit as the conversations go on. So I wanted to sort of ground us in the next phase of the conversation in what we're actually discussing and what was in the 2015 open internet order. So I'll start with just a very brief overview. I see a lot of familiar faces in the room, so I think people are generally keyed in to what we're talking about, but I do think it's helpful to name the rules that we're discussing as being so important to the success of people's livelihoods. So we have the three bright line rules that we talked about quite a bit in the last panel, no blocking, no throttling, no paid prioritization. In addition, the FCC implemented what they termed colloquially the general conduct rule. So this is a multi-factor balancing test that they would use to assess practices that were not covered under the three bright line prohibitions but which may create harm for consumers or for innovation or businesses. And so that sort of was a catch-all in case as technology evolves, new business models or new practices started to pop up that weren't contemplated in the open internet order in 2015, but were nonetheless a problem. The FCC also, while they didn't impose a rule, they did extend, they did claim oversight over interconnection disputes, which were disputes between the transit providers that carry internet traffic across the country and the world and the handoff that occurs to internet service providers that carry internet traffic into your home. And then finally, importantly, and this is sort of true of all the rules, those rules were all extended to mobile as well for the first time in a comprehensive way. And so OTI has been extremely supportive and pushed very hard for both the interconnection oversight and the extension of the rules to mobile. And so we're very much pleased with the regime that exists, but I do wanna kind of do a go around here just to get us all on the same page and see like, well, how do you guys feel about those rules, the rules that were adopted in 2015 and upheld by the DC Circuit last summer? I think while all of those are very important to startups and we support Title II, it would be great to have a legislative solution. I work with startups, they think of big ideas and they wanna tackle big problems. And so when you go to them and say, well, you know, it is 17 Title I and Title II and get deep down into the weeds, they are just like, why can't you just fix it and make it permanent? And then you have to explain that Congress doesn't get much done. But if we were gonna live in our perfect world, we would want to see these open internet rule codified into legislation and making sure that these rules are gonna be in place for the next generation of technology. 20 years ago when they wrote Telecommunications Act, we didn't have text messages and all of the things that power our businesses today. And so having clear rules that allow some sort of flexibility for the FCC to continue to adapt to emerging technologies would be incredibly beneficial for the startup ecosystem. That's right, we don't have to do this every four years. But sometimes having the uncertainty of this probably prevents the ISP from acting and some of the work that they're doing. We've also been doing this for 11 years. So to see them in action, to see them being defended and to continue the fight for them is something that we stand by and we stand with. I will say that the legislative option is not necessarily one that we would be pushing for that we love, especially given the congressional makeup as of the second. So I'll stick a pin in that one and we can have another forum about that. Well, and I mean, I would just, if I could jump in from my OTI hat, not my moderator hat. I mean, I think it's important to note that the rules have been upheld by the DC Circuit in their current form. So there is a degree of legal certainty that exists here that I think is important to acknowledge. So going back to the rules themselves, seeing the prohibitions and the general conduct rule, we hear a lot from critics of, whether opponents of net neutrality or critics of the FCC's 2015 approach that these rules were a solution in search of a problem. Is that true? Was everything like all working okay and these rules are just a backstop or were their actual net neutrality harms that you worry about or that your members worry about? And I think that's what happened today. Memorous murder reviews in which agencies have found that these companies have powerful incentives to do things, to study their competitors, traffic or anything that competes with their services. For me in the OTT space, we are a potential disruptor of the table and there's a big revenue that's very, very stable. And so the question for me is not, who do you think this is going to happen? Why wouldn't they do something if they had this power? If you were a horse and buggy manufacturer back in the day and you had a veto over your automobile, why wouldn't you think that? So I think there's, it's fairly self-evident that there is danger to competition, to startups, to new disruptive business models that, you know, you won't get to see if the ISPs are allowed to do what they can do with it. I think that most Americans only have access to one ISP. There is just a great need to see a referee on the field and make sure that somebody is holding these ISPs accountable. They have large monopoly powers in a lot of places and for a startup, that's a very scary thing to think that maybe your content won't be able to get out there or to be viewed or shared or get your consumers or what have you. I think there's clearly a need for an ISP solution. I think Pregaren was here earlier, he's been pretty positive all these times, I bet you can't trust Comcast to show them the window of time that they say they're going to show us. So if that's not the case, why are we handing this over and why are we thinking that these individuals and these companies really have our best interests at heart? And again, you just heard on the last pit a little bit about the broadband privacy discussion and the fight around, you know, securing our own information and being the owners of our own data. And we saw what happened with that. So thinking about all the various solutions, there are net neutrality solutions that might exist based on what you all just said, I don't want to put words in your mouth so I'll let you answer, but it sounds like you probably wouldn't trust an industry agreement or an industry commitments to protect net neutrality. Like would that be a workable solution in the absence of proactive rules? That's what I'm asking. To get startups to even care about what's going on in DC, I can't imagine they would have time to sit around in an industry agreed upon meetings and try to hold ISPs accountable for whether or not they're abiding by those golden rules that they all might hold hands and sing about. That's the obvious, it's worth it. One other criticism that we've heard from those pushing for repeal of the 2015 rules is that the STC is not the right agency to protect an open internet. And that's actually the STC or DOJ or some combination would be better cops on the beat. Is oversight at either of those agencies workable for you as a company, a trade association, or a racial justice organization? I'll start on this one. So we can talk a little bit about the DOJ and setting aside the fact that it is currently being run by an individual who may and or may not have had ties with Russia, who may and or may not have had this election. Jeff Sessions is an individual who what Strom Thurmond's judicial committee said was too racist. And he's currently our turn of general. And he is currently in charge of the DOJ. So no, I absolutely do not trust Jeff Sessions to have my or anyone's best interests at heart. This is the same individual who is currently repealing and running back every single protection that we have seen put in place from the civil rights investigations of things like Ferguson who have come out and with all of this information and has really shed light on what our world looks like. And I don't believe that we can hand over something as vital as our digital oxygen to an agency that has proven to not be worthy of trust. Thinking that a startup would actually have time to go and litigate a decision at the FTC or DOJ is almost laughable. Most startups end up failing. So you think that you're going to have time two years down the road to prevent evidence of how your content was throttled or an ISP somehow violated antitrust rules that are still unclear exactly how they would apply there is very difficult to see. We think that the FTC is much more capable of actually understanding the technological difficulties and getting deep into the weeds and providing that ex ante support that we really need to see to make sure that startups have a chance to survive. That deals with telecommunications and any dispute about net neutrality is going to have to get into issues of whether or not there's a throttling or there's a play of reason in the context and it's going to get into all kinds of technical issues and I don't, the other agencies, they have other mandates and they don't have the expertise in this area to figure out what's going on. And then finally, just on the sort of what, the rules that exist and why they're important. Can you talk a little bit about how important it is that the FTC's rules apply to mobile in addition to fixed fraud ban service? Is that something that is a make or break for the people you represent? I mean, you all just saw me pull out my phone that's sitting right here in my hand to read something to you. I'm sure, I'm looking out and seeing people on their phones like literally right now tweeting or texting or doing whatever the case may be. This is our life. This is our reality. The responses that I was reading to you all, one of the questions we asked folks was how do you access the internet? And I think about 30% of folks said mostly I use my cell phone, I use my smartphone. And not just that, but the digital divide is real. It's absolutely real. And we have folks who don't even have access to a computer at this point and don't have access to an internet unless it's at McDonald's or if it's at the public library or wherever the case may be, but have a smartphone. And if net neutrality doesn't come over into the world in which we live and the world in which we are going to continue to exist, it doesn't have any impact. I might go back to the talk that we've been doing about how the barriers to entry have been lowered significantly, and I think that if you look at any successful app developer, they would tell you that they all have a mobile first solution and that having a level playing build for mobile devices is just as important as broadband access. They just uplift the work of Commissioner Fiber and everything that she has been doing specifically on this issue and extending the Lifeline program and making sure that individuals not only have access to communications, but also to the internet. It's so important. I think also, as you guys talk about the role that mobile devices play, and Anika, you were looking out and seeing everyone on their phone. What I think is actually interesting too is the way people move from their phone to their laptops and the way they move from their cellular 4G service to the guest Wi-Fi at New America. And one thing that we have argued in our comments is that it would be an absurd result if as our Wi-Fi network became overloaded and you switched back to your cellular network that your net neutrality protections would suddenly vanish. So we've got a few more questions here and I do wanna leave time. I'm sure there's more questions from the audience. But we've talked a lot about the economic benefits, as we said, in the network and on the network. But we haven't talked as much, and I mean, Anika has highlighted the role that net neutrality has played in elevating the voices of everyone and the experiences of Ferguson. But I wanted to talk a little bit, to dig into this a little bit more. I think you've all made a strong case for why the rules protect investments and entrepreneurs, but that doesn't convey this full range of benefits that we see from net neutrality. So setting aside the economic benefits, why else are the FCC's current rules so important? If you look at the startups that are succeeding and the startups that are failing, usually startups fail for one reason. It fails because there's death by a thousand cuts. And so having the FCC there and maybe this is still an economic reason, but it's all those little things that end up killing a startup. And whether it's you had to pay to be on a fast lane or you had to negotiate with an ISP when you're a tiny company, you don't have the ability to do that or your services were throttled. It's just those little things that continuously add up and making sure that the FCC is there and protecting for all those little things so that our startups can focus on the big things, like creating the next great app or Amazon or what have you. So in other words, removing this worry about additional costs or things that might be imposed frees up companies to do things that are important to the company and the world. It lets people organize, period. I mean, we are living in a world in which books of our team have referred to it as hashtag the resistance has spurred. And this is literally the world that we're living in. We have seen things like the women's march. He created online, one of the largest mobilizations that we've ever seen in the entire world. We know things like hashtag no dapple. We know things like Black Lives Matter. We know things like say her name. We know every single one of these rallying cries because of their neutrality and because of folks organizing and using the tools that they're disposed of literally in their hands to say, I see something happening. How do I start this conversation? And not just how do I start this conversation. How do I insert this conversation into a narrative and into a media story that has never even listened and or looked. And it is, I firmly and fully believe that the internet is one of the greatest organizing tools that we have. And net neutrality in the wind in 2015 was one of the greatest civil rights victories of our time. Did you have something to add to that? I would just add that I end up with qualitative changes as well as quantitative ones. And so it's not, it may not be just that you have reduced investment but you have investment in different types of things. In the video, it might mean that we just see more of the same type of Hollywood stuff that we always see and less of the niche stuff that people may not even know you're interested in. We had a, we funded a little show called High Maintenance but a lead dealer years ago and it's on HBO now. But we are able to take a chance on that because we know, we rely on the fact that we wouldn't be throttled. We would not have to pay no additional amounts to get to our viewers. That's good. I mean, we know just to tell another story. I don't know how many folks here watch Insecure. I don't like it, it's like chance. Thank you. You know, Insecure started as a YouTube show called awkward black girl. Same thing with broad city. Same with all of these shows and all of these things that we currently love and things that give us, you know, a break from reality. Let our minds rest and allow us to be entertained. Allow us to find joy around us. Allow us to find community. Every single one of those things that I just mentioned they started online. And they started by free services that allowed folks to literally become artists. Become entertainers. Become expressors of their own ideas. And I think you're forgetting the most important which is a cat video. Yeah. I'm gonna say my last question for the end, but I'll open it up now to audience questions. This question is mainly for Vimeo. Your company does business in a lot of markets around the world. Are there anywhere you are in an environment where ISPs can say, if you pay us a little bit more we can make sure your video shows a bunch of subscribers screens. Is this something that you have to deal with anywhere else? Not as of yet. Hi, this is a question more directly for Anika because you talked about organizing so much. Some of the arguments that I've heard that I'm not really a fan of, but certainly that I've heard is that because of the whole, you know, quote unquote internet lynch mob effect that neutrality would be able to sort of stay in the way of that kind of thing. You know, I'm not sure what the right words would be for it, but that there should be an ability to protect people who, you know, for lack of a better word, make a misstep and find themselves the target of the internet's attention for that. And what do you think of that in general, I guess, as well as in terms of net neutrality? Could ISPs be able to sanitize the internet? Short answer, no, absolutely not. So I think there are a couple of different things here. I think in organizing and in talking about processors, one thing that we absolutely, we hold dear, which is our right to speak. And it is our right to be heard. And that first amendment right is not anything that we will jump on and anything that we will challenge. What we will challenge is hate speech. And what we will challenge is speech that insights the violence. And so there's a little bit of a difference there between what you're calling and, I'm sorry, an online, what do you call it? Okay, I've never heard that term, so sorry. Yeah, I mean, I think there's a complete difference between them. And net neutrality wouldn't be, I don't think the space where you would sort of try to figure out the solution to hate speech. Absolutely not, that's the first amendment. There's a lot of case law on that. I know a lot of lawyers in the building and real lawyers, fake lawyers here. And that is definitely the entire body of law that exists for that reason. Now there's questions, oh we got one back. Hi, I wanted to thank you all so much for sharing your different insights. It's been really helpful. I feel like with title one, title two, people are moving away and wanting Congress to kind of decide that. But I think, I guess my first question would be, what do you think that would look like if Congress was going to make the decision? And then a second thing would be, I feel like we're in an age of deregulation, we're in an age of emboldening of states' rights, especially looking at sanctuary cities. So if states were to regulate the internet themselves because it's such a transient force, how would that look? I'm thinking of maybe data localization and those types of problems, thank you. I think the two questions there were, if Congress could fix this and offer legislative solution, what would be necessary to be included in that for it to work? And then I think the second part of the question was, what rule do the states, is there a local regulatory play here? Congressional staffer, what congressional solution that we would be okay with would look like would just be a codifying of the rules. But Congress, the way that anything really gets done is that you're going to have to give and take in certain instances. I think there could be some interesting and creative solutions. There have been members who have proposed different ideas. Obviously at this point it's a give and take and it's been so highly politicized that I think people really are missing the key messages that most Americans agree with, which is no blocking, no throttling, no paid prioritization. FCC needs to be able to regulate in a highly competitive and changing and new and interesting environment that only the FCC is best equipped to deal with. Congress is definitely not best equipped to deal with rapidly changing technologies. We're innovating much faster than they could ever move. But unfortunately because this issue has become so partisan, it's hard to see a space where any sort of legislation really gets moved. I think what we'll see is that FCC move forward, end up back in court, maybe in a couple years Congress will look at it again. Everybody will yell at each other for a while and we're back to where we are now. I know that's not very optimistic, but. Yeah, I just wanted to talk on your second piece around states and local jurisdiction. So something that's analogous to this is what we saw happening with broadband privacy. A lot of folks in this room back in October, I wanna say, back in October, all of us were sitting around talking about broadband privacy and working with the FCC and getting these rules pushed and passed. Next thing we know, they're gone. Within. Like gone, gone. Like absolutely gone within like two weeks and everyone was like, what the hell just happened? We saw from that moment a rising up of states around the country who saw that this was an issue that they weren't necessarily even thinking about and saw down halls of consentue and pissed as hell and wondering why would anybody do this? Why would you sell out your own constituent and allow folks to literally own their own personal information? And so we saw, we're continuing to see. I think it's 15, 17 states, something like that? Many. Okay, let's go with many. Many states, many different states. I know the California Bill was just introduced. Many different states who are literally putting these things on the books to make sure that their folks and their people are protected. And I would venture to say that this would be the exact same wave that we saw happening with Robin privacy. I believe that if we end up with an outcome in which that neutrality is rolled back or pushed back, there will be an uprising in the state, I believe. I would say that our preferred solution for something as national as the internet, international even, is a federal solution and not a 50 state solution. But if Congress doesn't do anything, if the FCC doesn't do anything, there is room for the states to do things. And I think state attorney generals can enforce existing laws when there's things like throttling because I think in a case where it was throttling or even blocking, the provider is breaching into promise to its customer to provide the internet without any impediment. And so that's a classic consumer fraud case. Did you want to tackle, Michael, the question about what legislation would look like? No, I would agree. We want the rules and you can call it Title X if you want. It doesn't matter to us what you call it, but we want the substantive rules that are on the books now. Other questions? Hello, Wilmaria Escoto. I am a Google policy fellow at PKVS and I am a rising thrill at the Howard University School of Law. Thank you for coming out to speak to us. So you mentioned that the other proposed solution is legislation. One of the chief selling points of a legislative alternative is its relative permanence, the fact that a subsequent agency's commissioner can't really undo a statute and a Congress would find it hard to amend a repeal. However, given that technology moves more quickly than regulation, isn't it possible that such relative permanence may be more flaw than feature? Laws written with a particular technology in mind can inhibit the evolution. So my question is, aren't obstacles appearing in statutes much harder to modify or remove than if they appear in administrative rules? Yeah, so I'll take this one first. And first off, congratulations on making it to your third year. Enjoy yourself. And I will say that I started down this path in the spirit actually in law school as well. And trying to understand how it was that we created these laws based on a printing press and how in the hell did they turn into this? And I have constantly seen that and it is a lot of the work that we do in which we see folks trying to literally push, like what is it, the square peg into the round hole and the law is initially a big analogy as you know. This is like this thing. This thing is like this thing. It's not the internet is the internet. The internet is analogous to other things. And so I think that truly, you have mentioned the way that Congress works and the way that our laws are passed are incredibly slow. Such that, I don't know that we'll ever catch up. I don't know that we'll ever be out of place in which innovation and technology match the laws on the book. And that's why we organize. That's why we fight. That's why we have the internet to have these conversations. That's why we adopt new technology. To be able to fight for the lag, to be honest, August and going forward is trying to talk to legislators in a sort of rational outside of the Beltway way and saying like this is what actually matters to my business. And if you could find some sort of legislative solution that enshrines principles without actually naming technologies or carving out incumbent industries or trying to put a square peg in a round hole, honestly. Just putting a face to the companies that are actually working on this that are not the ISPs is really helpful because like somebody said on the other panel, 99.9% of companies are not ISPs. So there are a tremendous amount of people out there that would be impacted by enshrining these principles into law. And I think you can have flexibility in a congressional act if, as long as you're providing the authority for the FCC to go ahead and investigate things that are contrary to the overriding principles. I think that's what the general conduct rule does now. And I think it wouldn't be that hard to put some version of that into a statute. And I don't think you'd be freezing for all time. The technology that existed in 2017. Time for one more question from the audience. Otherwise, I have a wrap up question for us up here. From, I just walked in, I'm like late for school. So if I'm asking the same question, ignore it. But from an advocacy perspective, like who is more open to constituent voices, Congress or regulators in your opinions? They're both important, not to avoid answering the question, but they're important in different ways. We're encouraging, I know Etsy, I was speaking with Julie earlier today, they've had over 6,000 Etsy sellers write in comments to the FCC. We're encouraging all of our startups to write into the FCC because the reality is these rules are likely going to get litigated and to have a clear record of how Title II and the rules on the book impact startups and people is going to be very helpful for that litigation. I think also educating your members of Congress who are generally really old men who don't even really understand how the internet works, but actually saying like, hey, I'm here and I create jobs and I created this thing called an app and it's changing the way schools are teaching and it's changing the way you're ordering your groceries. It's great to have that personal connection with your member and I think it's great to have that legal framework when writing and submitting comments to the FCC. I mean advocacy is always a multi-pronged approach. That's power moves in various ways and in different channels. And in this specific fight, yes, we are definitely submitting comments to the FCC. Again, I'm gonna shout out internetirl.com if you would like to go ahead and submit a comment, feel free to go there. And we are also gonna be doing fly lives. We're gonna be talking to folks. We're gonna continue to address this issue literally on every single level that we can because it's not important. I would also, I'll take this opportunity because I don't think it's come up in the conversation yet but July 12th, the Battle for the Net site, we will be having a day of action around net neutrality. So I encourage all of you to keep an eye on July 12th that will be just a couple of days before, a few days before the first round of comments are due at the FCC and so I think you'll be able to see sort of advocacy playing out in real life, in DC and across the country, both in terms of what's happening and driving comments and submitting comments at the FCC combined with connecting voices and creating a political ground swell in that way. Yeah, I actually heard from a congressional staffer yesterday that there are generally a lot of interns on the Hill during the summer and a number of offices have asked more interns to come in on July 12th because they're expecting to see a lot of phone calls come in and so, and mostly they were complaining to me like, oh, you always make my job so much harder. But I was like, yeah, I'm really excited that they're almost afraid of July 12th coming and all of the advocacy start-ups, internet companies, raising their voices on July 12th to say, these are rules that are important to us. Yeah, exactly. Close with one final question for the panelists. I think we've touched on this but I want to sort of name it and I apologize for ending on maybe a downer note but there will be drinks after. So I feel like it's okay. I'd like to just go down the line again. We talked about why net neutrality is important to sort of start and maybe this time we could go around and talk about what the world would be like tomorrow or two months from now if the FCC's net neutrality rules just went away. Directly see from a start-up perspective is that these are not, venture capital firms are not going to be investing as heavily in industries that they think could be impacted, particularly content distribution platforms, types of apps or companies that are competing with other ISP interests. I think you're gonna see, and I know the other side loves to talk about their decreased investment. I think you'd see a decreased investment in start-ups that are in these highly competitive marketplaces. Color of change would be completely and totally different organizations. Imagine if folks couldn't go to our website and ban our petitions. Imagine if our emails were not delivered. It would be a completely and totally different world that we would be living in if net neutrality did not exist the way that it currently does. And I'll end with something that's really been sitting with me. How many of you all watch Handmade Still? I know I keep asking everyone for audience participation. That's me. Great. So a lot of you don't. You totally should. It's on Nicolu. You know, we're talking about the internet, y'all. Streaming services. So there is a quote that was said in one of the episodes. I actually don't know if it was in the book, so just bear with me on this one. In which one of the individuals who is essentially a slave master says to his essential sex slaves and says to her. Better never means better for everyone. It always means worse for some. And that is true, then true. And I would challenge you all as we leave here and as we continue to have those conversations to think about who is the better and who is the worse in those conversations and to also realize that when you fight and when you center what the Bible called the least of those. And winning there, everyone wins. Yeah, I think in terms of short term, you will see a chill in investment so things will get diverted from OTT and highly competitive, high bandwidth services to other things. And then longer term, there are some very scary implementations that the carriers could do. I could see a case one day you're watching on a Friday night and you set up to watch BIMI or whatever OTT show or a platform and it starts to rebuffer, it starts to get slow, it starts to jitter. And then a little message comes up saying, you know, we have similar content on a different program, just happens to be offered by your cable provider and we can guarantee that there's not gonna be any delivery problems. And by the way, it won't count towards your data caps. So, you know, and I don't think we're that far off technically from something like that happening. Done, done, done. So, I'll leave that with all of you and encourage you to continue to visit all of our sites for ways to continue to get involved and to protect. Thank you so much everyone.