 So I was looking for a good way to start, and I thought I'd start by remixing a little bit of this text. The text here begins with this four score and seven years ago. I thought I'd remix it a little bit by taking the four and seven out and putting in a one and a two. I'll tell you a story about how one score and two years ago, 1984, the Republicans invented the Internet. Now you might be a little bit confused because you might think about the fib that this guy told about something that this guy said. When Declan suggested that the vice president had taken claim for inventing the Internet, that of course was just not what the vice president had said. And it's also not true. It's very important that we recognize that the Internet was invented by the Republicans. In 1984, three extremely important things happened. Critical events to the future of the Internet that created an environment within which the Internet could happen. This environment that made possible this Internet is the environment we need to focus on as we think about policies and how they're changing the Internet today. So let's talk about these three Republican initiatives. First, you remember a company that used this logo, a company called AT&T, a company that was founded with a philosophy that said it should have the right to control, using its proprietary power, the design and use of the network it built. So for example, in 1921, the technology Hush-A-Phone was developed by the Hush-A-Phone company. It was a technology to attach to a telephone to make it a quieter device, which the name suggests. 1948, AT&T finally noticed this technology and decided they didn't like it. So they issued a series of actions with FCC complaints. One was the use of a Hush-A-Phone affects more than the conversation of the user. Its influence pervades the whole telephone system. What was the influence of this piece of metal? The influence was the idea that someone other than AT&T could innovate for the AT&T network. That idea, that innovation, threatened the idea that the network owner controlled the right to innovate and so they acted to try to stop that innovation. Or in 1964, this hero of mine, a man named Paul Baran, working for the RAND Corporation, which was then working for the Department of Defense, invented a technology we would eventually call packet switching technology, technology to make it possible to succeed with redundant communications The then dominant communication company at the time, a company called AT&T, responded to Baran's invention by saying first, it will never possibly work. And second, we're damned if we allow the creation of a competitor to ourselves. So once again, innovation here that threatened the network owner and that innovation had to be stopped. But in 1980, this man, Ronald Reagan, won election to the presidency and with him to Washington came this Californian, Bill Baxter. And Bill Baxter looked at a long series of investigations that had preceded against AT&T and said, okay, enough. The government would launch a process that would eventually lead to the breakup of AT&T. Baxter shaking the hands with the chairman of AT&T at the signing of the agreement that led to the breakup of AT&T. And that breakup, of course, was effective in 1984. The breakup was affected through a series of regulations, regulations that essentially achieved a kind of neutrality on this newly competitive network. Neutrality that echoes the regulations of common carrier, regulations of neutrality that guaranteed that the physical layer of the network could be added to by these other layers of a network that were foreign to that physical telephone network. So that the physical layer could, when attached to regulations begun with the Cardiff phone decision in 1968, mean that we could have a free layer sitting on top of another layer. Meaning, on top of this controlled-owned physical layer called the telephone network, we could add these other layers that would eventually produce the internet. And of course, though, the internet at its early stages was tiny, the dial-up internet, it eventually exploded into the internet when we think of today. This explosion, and ISPs, in 1994, more than 6,000 of them competing to drive this innovation. Competitive drive pushing penetration of the network in extraordinarily fast way. Indeed, we were the fastest in the world to come into the internet age. Now, there's a certain principle behind this action that guided the way AT&T was architected. The principle was this was infrastructure. This was communications infrastructure. And such infrastructure should be regulated to be neutral and competitive. It was neutrality and competition that would inspire growth on top of that network and drive prices for that network down. And so there were limits on the ability of the network owner to control how that physical property was used. The key here was that this principle drove growth and innovation on top of this network, one that embraced a principle, which network architects would call the end-to-end principle. Network to be kept simple. It was the applications attaching to the network that was to be smart. As David Eisenberg put it, this was the stupid network theory where Salter Park and Reid described it as the end-to-end theory of the network. So that's move one in 1984. Here's move two. May 21st, 1984, the FCC issued an NPRM following up on an NOI issued in 1981. This NPRM was to investigate the possibility of unlicensed spectrum. This was something radically new for the way the FCC thought about the spectrum. This is the map of the spectrum allocations. As you see, each little part allocated out to a particular use, licensed uses. This map interfered with this technology, the microwave. For the microwave emitted radiation in a certain band of spectrum. That emitted radiation meant it would interfere with any device that used that spectrum in a traditional way. This therefore was a spectrum wasteland and the FCC experimented with the idea of just giving it away, unlicensed use of this spectrum. Of course, this wasteland inspired the development of spread spectrum technologies using the full band of that spectrum. That encouraged an extraordinary amount of innovation on top of this resource that was technically a commons. Anybody was free to use and build upon that resource. A technology developed, which you know now by the name of Wi-Fi, that drove explosive growth of the deployment of this network resource. Again, it was because this commons built a neutral competitive platform on top of which innovation could occur. Limited private control over the resource here, maximized the innovation over this resource. Again, so the physical layer of this network could be extended because of this new free resource of unlicensed spectrum. These foundations were laid in 1984 for this development. Of course, it was many years later that it finally kicked into the effect that it's had on the internet. Here's the third event then in 1984. This one's a little bit more of a stretch than the other ones, but bear with me here for a second. This Republican initiative gets penned by this Republican appointee to the Supreme Court, appointed by this president to the Supreme Court. 1984, the Supreme Court finally issued a decision on a technology that had been in a litigation since 1976, the Sony Betamax technology. 1984, this technology which enabled law breaking. Law breaking meaning violation of copyright. But also had independent legitimate uses. This technology was ruled by the Supreme Court in Sony versus Universal City studios, not to make Sony responsible for the infringements of copyright that were committed with the technology that Sony designed, designed in a way that allowed people to commit copyright infringements. Now, this is a common principle, this principle behind the Sony decision. You could say it's a common GOP principle. For example, this technology has not inspired a big movement in the Republican Party to be regulated, even though that technology can be used for lots of harmful purposes. Instead, the Republicans are against regulating this technology and why? Well, because this technology is capable of substantial non-illegal uses. I'm not sure what they are for some of those technologies, but at least in theory, there's a substantial non-illegal use that's possible for a handgun. And because of that, the technology is allowed, even though the manufacturer benefits from the illegal use of that technology. Indeed, after that radically liberal mind circuit struck down Sony's right to release the VCR, this cartoon appeared in newspapers around the country. On which item have the courts ruled that manufacturers and retailers be held responsible for having supplied the equipment? Of course, it was absurd to think that while you are free to sell guns without any responsibility, you are going to be punished if you sold a VCR. Now, this decision by the Supreme Court gave birth to the consumer electronics industry. Consumer electronics industry's growth is built upon this minimal regulation of technologies in this context. We need no permission to deploy technologies here to innovate. The explosion innovation here is driven by that freedom. And that explosion expands the potential of applications and content in the internet, and that expansion itself is largely responsible for the growth, the success of them. So three decisions are foundational to the internet. Three decisions that allow us to say with some credibility that this is a Republican innovation. Commitment to these basic principles. One, competition. Two, minimizing the power of the dead hand of the past to control innovation today. This is a kind of Reaganomics for cyberspace. Now, this Reaganomics had an important consequence. The internet that was born really in our minds in the 1990s explodes, I think, because of the application of this particular structure of regulation to these technologies. And I want to talk about effects of the physical application and content layer of this network. Reflect on three particular features of each of these three layers that we've seen produced by this extraordinary innovation of design. First, I want to talk about the special kind of competition that this network has excited. Second, the economically extraordinarily valuable commerce this network has inspired. And third, the politically and socially revolutionary kind of activity the network has inspired. So first, the special time of kind of competition. As we said, this network was built on a principle that says that the owner didn't have the right to control the innovation that happened on that network. This produced a kind of commons, we could call it innovation commons, meaning the right to innovate was held in common in this architecture because anyone was free to attach devices and innovate for this network without needing permission of the network owner. What was the consequence of this particular design? The consequence is that the innovations on this network have a very particular character. Think about the major innovations in the history of the internet. Vince Serf and Bob Kahn were the ones who came up with the original protocols. In network theory land, they were basically kids in network theory. The web was invented in Switzerland by a CERN researcher. ICQ, the first peer-to-peer instant messaging chat service, was invented by an Israeli teenager. Hotmail, HTML mail is developed by an Indian immigrant. Google and Yahoo are invented by Stanford dropouts. What did all of these innovations have in common? They are all by kids and non-Americans. Outsiders to the ownership of the network and the dominant companies on the network. And this is no accident. It's a consequence of a certain design. It is a design that invites the widest range of innovation. That's the consequence of the end-to-end internet or the innovation comments it produces. Paradoxically, for the control obsessed. Paradoxically, less control over the right to innovate on this physical platform actually creates more innovation. Now, this innovation happens at two important layers. The application layer and the content layer. So the most important competition and the most value is added to the network. That innovation can happen there because it's at the application and content layer that people are free to develop new technologies for this network. So that's the first point. It builds innovation from innovators who are outsiders to the existing network. The second one, a little bit more obvious. The extraordinarily important economic value that this network has produced. Now, the first obvious Republican point about this value is that it is produced by competition. At the application layer, we have an extraordinary range of companies that have developed because they are free to innovate on this network without negotiating with the network owner. And in addition to the application innovation, we also saw important content innovation. Innovation, I'm going to call a little bit mysteriously, lead only innovation, but that's the innovation that's affected by companies like Apple's iTunes, Netflix, eBay. Read only innovation in the sense of innovation and value that's produced by people who are producing content that others get to consume. Now, this is a category we should think about because the internet is enabling it in an extraordinarily important way. The read-only internet is increasingly enabling this massively efficient technology to enable others to buy and consume culture anytime and anywhere, culture that is created elsewhere to be consumed. So the poster child for this is the Apple Corporation, the iTunes Music Store would sell songs at 99 cents, which you can download to your iPod and only to your iPod, but if you're guaranteed, if you download it and play it on your iPod in our culture, you will be cool. It's not just music, it's now video. You can download to your iPod for $1.99, and it's not just Apple, others too. Amazon is experimenting with a pay-per-page way of selling books. The e-book companies have been experimenting in the very beginning with a pay-per-read way of selling e-books. The point is they're developing technologies to increasingly perfect the capacity of content owners to control how people consume culture. This is the read-only internet. It is an extremely important value for this economy. It is an extremely important commercial value to this economy. Important economic growth is being driven by the expansion of this read-only internet. Finally, and in some circles, most importantly, this network is producing important politically and socially revolutionary activity. Think of this as the other half of the content space. Space that I want to call mysteriously for the moment, the read-write internet. That's the internet being encouraged and built by companies like these. So the read-write internet is of course interested in people consuming culture, but in addition to consuming, they're interested in encouraging people to create and share their creativity. Pew did a study recently finding that 57% of teenagers had created and shared content on the internet. That's not people who have downloaded music illegally in Napster. That number is more like 99%. These are people who have actually created stuff and shared it on the internet. Let's get some examples to make sure you all know exactly what I'm talking about. First is a new kind of innovation called anime music video. How many people have seen anime music video? It's a very well-educated product here. You all know what anime is. Anime are these Japanese cartoons. Anime music video is produced by people taking anime, re-editing it, setting it to a music track. I'm going to show you two clips. First of all, the art is found art. Reset to this music. So these are creators. You could call them re-creators. There are literally tens of thousands of these creators that function in communities across the world, with this kind of re-creativity that they produce and share with each other freely on the internet. You could call this a kind of remix. It's a remix of anime videos. But it's not just anime music videos that demonstrate this kind of creativity. The context of music. You all know this album by the Beatles, called the White Album, which inspired this album by Jay-Z, called the Black Album, which inspired this album by DJ Danger Mills, called the Gray Album, that literally synthesizes the tracks of the White Album and the Black Album together to produce something great. Or in the context of this ordinary life in 2004, this film, Tarnation, made its debut at Cannes. It was set by the BBC to WoW Cannes. It was a film made for $218. Kit took video that he had shot through his whole life and using an iMac given to him by a friend. He remixed it at a level to WoW Cannes and to win the 2004 Los Angeles International Film Festival. But perhaps most importantly, this is the context of politics. Let me give you three examples. This one's a little simpler to make. That's my job. This is my future. It's up. So this is the read-write internet. This is the read-write culture that the internet begins to encourage. This is what creativity in a digital platform begins to beg for, right? This is a kind of democratization of capacity, of capacity because nothing you've seen here is anything which television studios or film studios couldn't have done for the last 60 years. What's important here is that the capacity to do this has been spread now to anybody who has access to a $1,500 computer. These tools of creativity thus become tools of speech used to express ideas in the vernacular of our times. We who live with texts who believe that reading is what's important need to recognize that reading is the new Latin. That the way people speak and communicate is not with text. They speak and communicate in exactly this form and that now the technologies have exploded this wider range of media from audio and video and graphics to make them as accessible as the pencil and the typewriter were to those of us who grew up with text. This is an extraordinarily important new potential. It's a new potential to speak. It's a new potential to learn. It is literacy in the 21st century. Now interestingly this new kind of literacy, this new technical capacity has the capacity to reverse a trend that was bemoaned exactly a century ago in this city. When this man, this horrible composer, John Philip Sousa, traveled to this place, the United States Congress to complain about this technology, what he called the talking machines. Sousa was not a fan of the talking machines. This is what he had to say. These talking machines are going to ruin artistic developments of music in this country. When I was a boy in front of every house in the summer evenings you would find young people together singing the songs of the day or the old songs. Today you hear these infernal machines going nights and day. We will not have a vocal cord left, Sousa said. The vocal cords will be eliminated by a process of evolution as was the tale of man when he came from the ape. Right now it's this image I want you to focus on. This image of people gathering together singing the songs of the day or the old songs. That's an image of culture. It's what we would call read, write culture. It's a culture where people participate in the creation and recreation of their culture. It's read, write in that sense. Sousa's fear was that we would lose the capacity to engage in that read, write cultural production because these infernal machines would have taken it away. That would have displaced this practice. And in its place we would have the opposite of read, write culture. We would have a read-only culture. A read-only culture where creativity is of course consumed but the consumer is not a creator. Culture would be top down in this world. The vocal cords would have been lost. Now if you look back over the 20th century in at least the quote developed world end quote, it's hard to conclude that Sousa was not right. Never before in the history of culture has its production been as concentrated. Never before has it been as professionalized. Never before has creativity been as effectively displaced by these quote infernal machines. The 20th century was the century where the read, write culture of our past was displaced by a read-only culture dominating the way most of us get access to the culture around us. But what the internet has the opportunity to do is to reverse this trend. The infernal machines that Sousa complained about are now extraordinarily creative machines offering our culture not the end of read-only culture but a complement to read-only culture. Tools to enable wider range of people to become speakers and creators. A new social and a new political and importantly new economic value. Now you can celebrate this for lefty value reasons you can say oh self-expression democratic creative right but that's a kind of Berkeley justification for this and I'm from Stanford I want to focus on the writing like values behind this money. The read-write internet is justified primarily in this scheme by recognizing one important fact which is almost impossible to deny. The difference between the read-only and read-write internet is that the read-write internet will be massively bigger and more valuable to economic growth. Think about the computers that bandwidth the devices the software the consequence of allowing this technology to take off would be the explosion of this internet this internet which again has its roots in very republican ideas. So there's the happy part of the story let me shift now to the corruption of this story the corruption in particular of these three ideals that set the base of the original internet these three ideals have not aged well over the past 22 years indeed this month I believe we're going to see the end of the final of these three ideals now the first of them to go was the principle and ideal embraced in this case this case the sony betamax case which minimize the regulation of new technologies shifting responsibility for illegal uses of those technologies to those engaging in illegal behavior the new best friends of the republican party have become the copyright cabal i've noticed this at the very end this republican logo is actually copyright if you see down here at the bottom the new best friends of the republican party um it's hollywood because the republicans heart hollywood here it's the fastest growing source of revenue for the republicans and the poster child republican on the side of the content industry is our friend marin hatch gop now embraces the idea of regulating these tools to control the way content is created and distributed as well as the behavior that might violate the copyright laws this increase in regulation to protect one of these two forms of cultural production read only cultural production this system of regulation reinforces and protects read only culture the simple rules of sony are gone and we have massive rent seeking increasingly replacing this original rule of minimal regulation the consequence of this is the chilling of another form of cultural production which is the read write internet because the read write and read only internet's conflict at the level of copyrights regulation while copyright embraces and extends the power of the read only internet because it allows content owners to control content whenever it's quote copy at every single use of content in a digital network is a use which quote copies that content the read write internet depends upon a broad range of freedom to build upon and transform culture and exactly that freedom is denied by copyright in its current incarnation so we strengthen the read only culture and we thereby weaken the read write culture the consequence is that the potential of this internet is reform a smaller less valuable less important internet in the read write space develops while the read only is the dominant now you could say there's a silver lining here at least if the republicans have begun to embrace the idea we should be regulating tools that can do harm we should look forward to some gun control being proposed by the republican party i imagine right you could say that's a little bit odd that we wouldn't have done that first because of course no one ever died from downloading music from grogster unlike gun control example but the point is this principle which was foundational to the opportunity of consumer electronics is now corrupted me too spectra particularly the practice of making unlicensed spectrum available in the comments that practice which gave birth to wi-fi and now promises a wide range of extraordinary uses of a spectrum what we've seen in the last four years of this administration is actually a reversal in a principle that gave birth to this unlicensed common spectrum increasing drive to auction or proper ties spectrum has actually led as the new america foundation has calculated to a decrease in spectrum available in the commons by something like 10 so that this physical layer available for the spread and development the internet is actually being shrunk we're raising the cost of this physical layer and thereby restricting innovation and importantly here shifting the resource spectrum to entities from which it's easy to fundraise government resources become sources of government privilege and that reverses the idea of this open neutral platform upon which innovation can grow and finally the corruption of the neutral network there is an overwhelming push now in this city to restore the principles that stood behind this company's ownership of its network the principle that says the network owners after all it's quote our pipes mr winnaker said to control both the contents and the applications that flow across that network compromising this competition at the content and application layer simply to give a higher return to owners at the physical layer now this compromise of these original principles here principles that are effectively sold some estimate by a million dollars of campaigning every day around the issues around network neutrality in this area alone now i started by talking about one score and two years ago birth of the republican party's contribution to the internet one score and two years ago was also the last time that i actually voted for this party but i was at the time a died in the world republican indeed in 1980 i was the youngest member of a delegation to the republican national convention so this was my birth but those ideals have been lost these principles have been lost the ideals that were born then of neutral competition and balanced ip are no longer principles guiding this party corruptive could say indeed as the washington times at an op ed today reports we are quote operating off borrowed time if congress does not reinstate network neutrality soon the internet's most americans know and love will be gone this is an op ed authored by the christian coalition and move on dot war right and as they started they said when move on and the christian coalition are writing the letter together you can bet something deeply troubling is going on in congress more fundamentally what is happening is that these political movements have lost touch with an important base an important base of ideals which really explained much of the passion behind this movement now as a democrat i guess i should be happy about this because this gives us an opportunity to rally the troops we can say the environment was sold to exon we could say the war was sold to hella burton and now we can say the internet was sold to atn t but even a harness and as strong as i can't seem to rally much energy and excitement over this last particular event at least extraordinary and weird period that we've lived in the last 20 years where both the right and the left had a coalition of ideals and it's that coalition of ideals that made the internet possible a coalition is finished and as these parties perhaps separate and so at least hope that they take different paths the conditions under which the internet was born would change and the opportunity that we've seen in the last 22 years that that environment produced would be removed thank you very much