 Good afternoon everyone. Welcome to the Ford School. I'm Michael Barr, the Joan and Sanford Wildein of the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. It's my delight to welcome you all here this afternoon for policy talks at the Ford School, our first one of the year. Our talk today is co-sponsored by the School of Information, the Science Technology and Public Policy Program, and the Program in Practical Policy Engagement. Please join me in welcoming Jessica Rosenwurzel, our special guest, and Jack Bernard from the University's General Counsel Office. It's my honor to introduce them both, and I'm going to start with Jack, who will be hosting the dialogue with the Commissioner. Jack is the University of Michigan's Associate General Counsel and a colleague of mine on the Faculty of the Law School. Jack has been with the General Counsel's Office since 1999, and along the way he's taught courses at law, the School of Information, the School of Education, and here at the Ford School. He received his JD from the University of Michigan Law School and his Masters in Higher Education from the U of M Center for the Study of Higher and Post-Secondary Education. Jack is an expert on intellectual property, copyright, computing, and cyber right, and First Amendment and free speech, among other topics. I was also learning that he has become temporarily an expert on dealing with special student problems at the beginning of the year. I won't say anything more about that. Jack, thank you very much for joining us here. I'm very, very delighted to have you. I'm also delighted to introduce our featured guest, Federal Communications Commissioner, Jessica Rosenwurzel. Commissioner Rosenwurzel has over two decades of outstanding leadership in communications policy and public service. She was appointed to the FCC by President Obama in 2012 and reappointed by President Trump in 2017. Prior to joining the agency, she served as Senior Communications Counsel for the United States Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation. Her portfolio covered a wide range of communications issues, including spectrum auctions, public safety, broadband deployment and adoption, universal service, video programming, satellite and television, local radio, and digital TV. Before joining the committee, she served as legal advisor to former FCC Commissioner Michael Cops, and previously, she'd been in private practice. Commissioner Rosenwurzel is a native of Hartford, Connecticut and a graduate of Wesleyan University and New York University School of Law. The commissioner is a well-earned reputation in DC as a creative and tireless champion for opportunity, accessibility, and affordability in our nation's communication services. She coined the term homework gap to draw attention to the problem of growing inequality in school children's access to high-speed internet based on socioeconomic status and geography. This is, I believe, the commissioner's first visit to Ann Arbor. Is that right? Second. It was so good I came back. Awesome. But like many of people around the world, she has a special Michigan tie. Her mother was a student here, graduate of the University of Michigan, so I will share our wonderful expression, go blue. I'm really excited to have Commissioner Rosenwurzel here, and please join me in thanking her for being here. So let me just say a word about our process. In about 20, 25 minutes after the hour, staff will begin walking around the room to collect questions from those in the audience, and they'll compile questions from Twitter as well for those watching online. Jack will transition us into the Q&A, and the commissioner will take your questions. The Q&A will be facilitated by a Ford School postdoctoral fellow, Molly Kleinman, who manages the science, technology, and public policy program, along with Ford School students, Jackson Voss and Lindsay Mocochi, who are right here. With that, let me turn things over to Jack, and I very much look forward to the conversation. Thank you. Thank you. Well, welcome again to Michigan. We're really happy to have you here, and you can see you've got a full audience. Oh, thank you. I thought we might start with talking a little bit about how you got here. I mean, I know that the dean gave a little bit of your bio, but I'm wondering if you might share a little bit more about yourself. You know, I was asked this question earlier by some students, and I think the way I put it was, there are those people who knew what they wanted to do from day one, and they took every job and took every class and service of that goal, and studiously reached that goal. I was not one of those people. It didn't go like that. I came from a family of scientists, including my mother, who went to graduate school here, and the most rebellious thing I thought I could do was go to law school. So I went to law school. I found myself in Washington. I practiced there for a while, and I worked on the privatization of a publicly-owned utility, which, if you spend some time studying economics and engineering and law, is actually quite interesting. And shortly thereafter, I had an opportunity to join the junior staff of the Federal Communications Commission, because a few years earlier, Congress had passed a law known as the Telecommunications Act of 1996, and there was a lot of work to do to implement that law. So I spent time on that. I eventually went to work for a commissioner, and then I went to work on Capitol Hill, where I worked on issues involving the digital television transition, satellite service, and then worked with the Obama administration on securing more spectrum. So first responders could talk to one another, an idea that eventually became law, and then I had the privilege of going to the agency to oversee the implementation of it, where I learned quickly that implementing a law and just coming up with the idea are two different things. That's great. I think for so many in the room who are really thinking about a life in public service and doing public policy work, it's great for them to see a little bit about what might be a rough and tumble path to get where maybe you really want to go. Well, you have to be open to the opportunities that come your way, and along the way it causes just the right amount of trouble to make them happen. So you are a commissioner on the FCC right now, and I think people in the room have a generalized notion of what the FCC is, but I'm wondering if you might unpack that a little bit for us. Well, I'm totally biased, but the FCC oversees about one-sixth of our economy, communications and technology, and I think it is the most exciting sector of our economy, so that involves everything from broadcasting to broadband, from Wi-Fi to wireless, the satellite services in the air. If you think about it, you can't go through the day without touching some form of communications that the FCC oversees, and it's an institution that Congress created in 1934, back when it decided that on a day to day basis they didn't think Congress should be the entity deciding how we divvied up our airwaves and managed radio service. Since that time, communications has just grown more and more important in all of our lives, and the FCC as a body makes decisions about communication service and public policy, and Congress oversees us, but we have a lot of authority because there are a lot of issues before us. So how does the FCC interact with the Internet? How do we interact with the Internet? If you think about the FCC, I think the easiest way to talk about it is we think about communications transmission. Our jurisdiction and our authority largely speaks to making sure there's a wire in the ground, or there are airwaves that are allocated for wireless service or satellite service, and it's that transmission that's an input into everything we do in modern life, and that's where our authority primarily lies. So in anticipation of your arrival here, I'd been thinking about this for several weeks and started talking with people about the central theme of our talk today, which is probably going to focus on net neutrality. So I started asking people in our community here what they thought about net neutrality. And what I discovered was that people have a wide range of conceptions about what net neutrality actually is, and some people have very, very strong feelings about things that I'm not actually sure are net neutrality. So I'm wondering if you might give us a, oh, at least a working definition of net neutrality, and perhaps if you could try to give us one that isn't laden with a particular viewpoint, we'll get deep into the viewpoints. All right, I'm going to try to be acronym and viewpoint free. We'll see if I succeed, because that's a hard task for someone from Washington. I think net neutrality means that your broadband providers have to treat the traffic on their networks equally so that they do not discriminate on the basis of source, destination or content. Let me put that in better English. It means that you can go where you want and do what you want online, and your broadband provider does not make decisions for you. It means your broadband provider does not have the legal right to block websites, to throttle online services, or censor online content. So you used the word equally there, and I'm wondering when we're thinking about this, and now we're kind of leaving our definition, but what do you mean by equally? Well, nondiscrimination is what I mean by equally, which has been a principle of our communications and networks laws for a long time. I mean, so much so you don't even realize it, right? Like, think back to the basic telephone network. It is a given that if you went to a wired phone on a wall, you can call whoever you want. And the telephone company can't decide you can't call that person, nor can they go in and edit your conversation. In other words, you have a nondiscriminatory right to make that phone call. It's up to you. Those ideas transferred to the digital age are what I think about when I think about traffic and treatment with net neutrality, which is again, you should be able to go where you want, regardless of source, destination, or the content you're seeking to access without the broadband provider getting in the way. So to me, we're really talking about nondiscrimination, which has been a principle of our thinking about networks and communications for decades and decades. So I've noticed, though, that the different broadband providers I've engaged with, they provide different suites of services or different speeds or a variety of other options. So my experience isn't uniform. So I'm wondering really what you're talking about. Yeah, you can get these things, I think, confused, but it is perfectly acceptable for someone who doesn't do a lot of online activity to decide that they're happy with 200 kilobits speed. It's good for their email. You come to my house and you got four people who are all trying to watch videos simultaneously. I'll pay for a gigabit. And I think that every consumer should have the right to make those choices. But they're making the choices. Your broadband provider is not making the choice for you. So how is it that in the absence of net neutrality, our broadband providers might interfere with your four video family watching group enjoying videos online? I mean, what could they do that would undermine your experience? Here's what I know. Since we rolled back our net neutrality policies, our broadband providers have the legal right to block websites, to throttle online services and censor online content. They have the right to go to any entrepreneur or creator that wants to put something online and say, Hey, if you want to reach that customer, you got to pay us a toll. So after you give an entity that legal right, you have to ask this question as a matter of public policy. They have that legal right. Do they have the technical ability to do that? Yes. Network management would allow them to do that. Do they also have the business incentive? Well, yes, if there's a greater revenue associated with those behaviors, charging more to reach certain websites, I'm sure they try to engage in it. And when you align a legal right with technical ability and a business incentive, over time, you expect that those behaviors will emerge in the marketplace. And by rolling net neutrality back, I think we did just that. I don't think it's good. I don't think it's good for consumption or creation online. So one of the things that I think about when we add regulations to a system is that we've encumbered the system. And I think a lot of net neutrality detractors talk about the idea that when the FCC added regulations, in support of net neutrality, that actually the system became encumbered and that it was working just fine beforehand. And this was a, it wasn't a problem. The kinds of behaviors you were talking about were rare and not a normative thing. And why would we need to encumber the system with regulations? Well, a few things. First, we had regulations in place and that has a way of disciplining market actors. They make sure that they try to abide by them. And therefore, we did not have a lot of violations. The second thing I would say is when you think about regulation, I think the question is how much oversight you want in a marketplace. I believe you need less oversight if you have a competitive marketplace. Competitive marketplaces are themselves the best regulator of activity. But when you look at the broadband marketplace, according to the FCC's own data, about half of the American public does not have a choice of broadband provider. That's not exactly competitive. And as a result, if your broadband provider decides to muck around with your traffic, block websites, or charge you a premium for reaching certain content, you can't pick up your business and take it elsewhere. There's nowhere else to go. And it's the absence of that competition that I think makes some light oversight from agencies like the FCC useful and necessary for consumers. So I want to dig a little deeper there because my own experience with my broadband and cable provider was that even when the net neutrality rules were in place, I felt those constraints you were just describing. That is, my broadband provider only provided so much speed and only so many options. And I felt constrained by that because I really didn't have a lot of choices. How is this, how is that? It's a huge issue. A net neutrality issue, though. To me, if the marketplace was robust and everyone had a handful of providers, they would compete to provide you all with the best service. And I do think they make an effort to do that now. But they would compete, and perhaps compete, on the basis of making sure your internet experience was as open and free as possible. But in the absence of having that many providers, we don't have that competition. And that's what net neutrality rules are designed to help manage. To make sure that consumers can go where they want and do what they want online, even in the absence of a fully competitive market. So what's this, what specifically changed when we rolled back the net neutrality rules? What specifically changed? The FCC had in place rules that said, you can't block, you can't throttle, you can't engage and pay for play prioritization. Where you treat some traffic just like you do with the net neutrality rules. Traffic just fine because they pay you and can sign the rest to a bumpy road. I don't think those policies were radical. They were radically popular. They'd also been upheld by the courts. And speaking as an FCC commissioner, we don't always get the luxury of our rules being upheld by the courts. So they were justified by judges well received by the public. They were stable, but we chose to roll them back anyway and that was done over my dissent. You were very vocal and brought forward arguments and we're not able to persuade your fellow commissioners. Yes, yes. Just deviating a little bit from where we were going. Although I'll come back. What is that like? What's the experience of being the holdout or the lone dissenter? Well, I'm a Democrat in Washington right now so I have a lot of experience with this. I firmly believe people don't remember what you said but they remember how you said it. So you try to make your objections in a principled way. You try to find those arguments that will lead people on the margins to find your ideas compelling and then you repeat them over and over and over again. And then when you've irritated people you still repeat them. And again and again. And I think you can make change over time if you do that. It's not a single act or a decision and I think we were talking about this earlier net neutrality has become that. The FCC made what I believe is a misguided decision late last year but millions of people wrote our agency and in the wake of all of their anger about our decision they did something about it. They took governors. There are now six governors who require net neutrality in their state contracts. They went to mayors. There's more than 100 mayors who've committed to do the same. They went to state houses and there are laws now in Oregon, Washington, Vermont and Governor Brown in California made by the end of the month be signing another law. And they went to court and in Congress in the United States Senate legislation was passed to overturn the FCC. And if you stand back and look at that swell of activity that's democracy and action. That's people actually doing what the system contemplated which is participating and creating change. So I don't think the net neutrality story is over and I have this optimism that if that continues we can once again return internet openness to the law of the land. So how do you, you've had this difference of view on a very public matter whether or not people really understand it it's still up for debate I think but you've had this real difference how do you build collegiality after this kind of sism? That's a really good question. It's one that you should probably ask everyone in Washington. I'll tell you how I do it. I try to decide whatever disagreement we had is like a book that goes on the shelf and I'm moving on to the next volume. And I try to find something with each of my colleagues I might be able to agree with on them. I have a colleague on the other side of the aisle we do a lot of work together on unlicensed spectrum policy trying to figure out which is a fancy way of trying to figure out how much more Wi-Fi we can put in our airwaves. And make a real effort to make sure that we can open a book together even if we have other disagreements that there's something that we can find agreement on. I think that's important. It doesn't always exceed but you should keep trying. So hopping back into net neutrality and we took a little detail there but I'm wondering if you would be willing to take a moment and to try to steal man as opposed to straw man the position on the other side. Let's see. This is a good exercise. It feels almost like academic, right? Washington needs to be careful. It can over-regulate industries. It can come up with policies that are well intended and the results can be harmful. We want our broadband providers to experiment and come up with packages and plans that serve everyone and if taking revenue from online platforms is an important part of that mix or setting up services that only allow people to reach small portions of the Internet could create more and different packages. We want them to have that freedom to experiment. We also want them to be able to raise enough revenue as private sector actors so that they can deploy their broadband networks further and in more places. I think that that would be the argument that would be made on the other side. No, I could pick apart what I just said. But if I were still talking to you as the person bolstering that view and I said, well, how does net neutrality interfere with that? This is getting really confusing. How will that work? God, I just don't think it will. I'm being honest. That's all right. I think that there are questions about what's called zero net rating with that and how much experimentation you should allow providers to have with respect to exempting certain websites or activities from online data caps. But now we're getting a few levels in. All right, well, let me let you become yourself again. Oh, I appreciate that. Thank you for that. I do think it is important to be able to do what you just did because I think if you want to make progress anywhere in Washington or on your local transportation authority board, you need to be able to understand what's driving the other side and to be able to distinguish politics as driving the other side or whether there's actually a fundamental principle that's at stake. And I would like to pause and say, if I came to that position as a decent individual, why did I reach that result? You have to subject yourself to that discipline in order to make sure your arguments are tighter, but also because you might find some bridges if you subject yourself to doing that. So one thing I think we hear a lot from industry along these lines is that net neutrality is a barrier to investing in infrastructure. And it's a barrier because with net neutrality, the state, I mean, the government is essentially nationalizing the investment of these individual portions of the sector who are trying to invest in infrastructure, essentially creating a kind of easement on spaces they've put forward. The arguments that we've heard. I'm wondering how you'd respond to that. Listen, we do have broadband challenges in rural parts of this country. We've got about 24 million people in the United States without broadband, as we've defined it today. 19 million of them are in rural and remote communities. And instead of having theoretical arguments about net neutrality, I would like to map where those people are and identify how we're going to build support programs for the infrastructure and new technologies that are going to make serving them more feasible. When you say we, do you mean we the government or we? We as a nation, collectively. Both public sector and private sector actors. So do you think it's possible that along with advocating for net neutrality, you could advocate for incentives, government incentives for industry to do just those things? Absolutely, I think it is. Those two things are not inconsistent. You can do both things at the same time. I think that is a false choice to present it as one or the other. So getting back to this idea of equality, could it not be the case that maybe less than equitable service might actually be better for the whole? I mean, for instance, think about things like traffic roads where we give a preference to some vehicles, perhaps vehicles that are traveling with more than one person in them. Or at the grocery store, you know, there's a line for cash and a line for credit card. Here's a premise that you have there. There are multiple lines. The point is that there is a lane for traffic with people with, you know, carpools. And there are several other lanes. That is something that is plausible in a market that is competitive enough to sustain multiple lanes. The fundamental problem with our broadband markets right now is even data from the FCC suggests it's not. So I think that that analogy has limitations when it comes to broadband service. Do the limitations stem from the fact that there tends to be, for each market, only one or potentially two broadband providers? I think that is the most significant problem. So if there were a greater proliferation of competition, then would we... I think we would revisit these questions, yes. And we might not need net neutrality? I think we would revisit whether it's necessary. Okay, well, that does make some sense. So one of the things that we frequently see pointed out by people who are advocating for net neutrality is this idea that there would form cartels of relationships of people across industries. So there would be the people who... there would be the broadband providers who liked Netflix and the ones who liked YouTube. And that if you were with one, you'd get one service more quickly and if you were with the other, you'd get... is there any evidence for that? I think there's discussion some of that is starting to happen. It doesn't preclude you from reaching the other. But you know, we're all super impatient. You know, that little circle of death comes up on your screen. I don't know about you, but I'm surprised at how swiftly I click off that and try to find something else. And even the slowest bits of throttling can change consumer behavior. And if you think about it, what you just described is also really over time corrosive for entrepreneurship. Who's that person who's going to come up with some new video site? How are they going to find a way to get into the marketplace when it's been divvied up between these major providers so that ordering your internet service is more like ordering your cable service where you choose channels? That's... I think the greater concern over time is for entrepreneurship and the inability to develop new services that may not be able to afford the premium that's paid for those sweet speeds that prevent you from having that little circle go round and round. I suppose that creates an obstacle for the argument for net neutrality because it's really difficult for most people to imagine the world a lot different than it is right now. That's right. Absolutely. So how do you overcome that? You know, it's hard. I can point back to a whole bunch of small episodes where a voice-over internet protocol provider was denied service another time when Google Wallet and FaceTime were not available on certain services, but the truth is with consumer pressure and net neutrality laws in place, we were able to override those. On a going forward basis, I think my agency has denied itself the authority to fix those problems, and I have concerned that apps and our pressure combined with consumer pressure, it won't be so easy to do so in the future. One challenge given the people in the room here is that everyone here, or just about everyone here, has access to really high-speed technologies through the university. If you look on a map of the United States, some of the best broadband is in big university towns. For research, the number of young people, you all use it in ways that are not available to so many other places in the country, and it's almost hard to fathom, but I've been in schools where students can't all get online at the same time to take some standardized tests because we'll overwhelm the system. I've been in towns where there are kids who are just sitting outside the library late at night because they can't get service up the road where they are at home just to get online. These things are happening in the United States right now. I feel like if we can create this abundance here, we must be able to figure out support systems and technologies that help get it everywhere. It is a big problem. The only time I ever notice a real drag on the system is during football games. Oh, my gosh. Maybe you're not the only one. So I think a rare thing has happened, and maybe it won't be rare in the future, but in that lots of Americans now know the name of the chair of the FCC. I know, right? What's that like? Isn't that strange? I think that's strange. You know, I like a little anonymity. I'm okay with it. You know, in one way, on a personal level, I like a little honor. It's okay. It's not me. But then on another level, I think, well, that's terrific because otherwise we're just making decisions without public input. And we'll get some big industry over here that wants this. There's a public side that wants that. But what's terrific right now is that the public is starting to understand the work of the agency, and they're speaking up. They're letting us know. And I think it's incumbent on public sector actors like myself to figure out how to talk about these things without drowning it in industry-specific language and academic terms and figuring out how to make it accessible to a broader swath of the United States gets to participate in decision-making in Washington. I think that's really important. And so there's upside to people knowing who we are and what we do. And it actually leaves me a little excited to realize that that's true. Well, we definitely appreciate you coming out here even though you prefer a more anonymous approach. But I think it is really important for people to be able to engage. Right. I'm wondering, have you noticed, will there be any... Because you're out speaking out against the posture that your colleagues took. Does that create consequences? Sure. I mean, people prefer going to any room. Someone's going to like you better if you agree with them. I mean, that's the way things go. But I look at what's happening in Washington right now, and I think you've got to speak out, and you've got to speak out consistently on the things you think are most wrong. I brought us to the discussion of Chairman Pai, and I'm interested in news that took place recently as maybe lots of people in the room know. Both houses in California passed a net neutrality-like bill for California. And within the last couple of weeks, actually within the last couple of days, Chairman Pai took a very strong position against that, really suggesting that California was illegally flouting federal law. So I'm wondering two things. One, what you make of that statement, and two, what you think about the California proposal. Okay. First, listen, he's a nice individual. I have pretty fundamental disagreements with him on some things like this. With respect to California, I think I alluded before that I'm excited. I see democracy and action in state legislatures getting involved. I do think the FCC is in a strange legal position when it comes to issues of preemption with the states. And I don't think you need a law to agree to understand this, but I'm going to talk about preemption for a second. The agency in its decision late last year said, oh, we don't have authority. We made a mistake before to have these net neutrality rules. I'm going to roll them back. We can't possibly do this because we don't have authority. I disagree with that. But if the position is you don't have authority, you also don't have the right to then go tell the states they too don't have authority, because by virtue of you choosing to exit this area of the law, you don't get the right to preempt others. And I think that there's some cognitive dissonance in that position that needs some explaining. I was trying to figure out really what he was getting at. Apparently I'm not the only one in cognitive dissonance. I was wondering whether he was going to make a kind of first amendment argument that somehow this was going to be a constraint on the ability of corporations to facilitate communication in some way that where a state like California might overstep, I couldn't figure it out. I think it's more about commerce clause. Listen, we're now living in a universe where these interstate networks are so important to what we do. And the question is how do we have a mix of federal authority and state consumer protection that manages these kind of services. And I don't think we have the digital age jurisprudence to fully manage that right now. And so that's something that I see his position. He's trying to articulate. We might come out in different places on it, but I think that that is certainly an issue, and I respect that he has some concerns about it. Before we leave net neutrality, I was wondering if you might help the audience at least be able to describe your view in a pithy way. How would you summarize your view so that when people go home to dinner and say, I just went to this amazing talk today, I love seeing government in action, and here's what I learned. I think I said it earlier. You should be able to go where you want and do what you want without your broadband provider making choices for you. All right. I'm almost bumper sticker, right? So I expect we'll get some questions about that. I want to, if it's okay with you, I want to stroll into a few other areas. So the FCC thinks, has thought for at least 30 years about consolidation of media. And I've noticed a change of late in that posture, and I'm wondering whether you could unpack that issue for us a little bit and then talk about what your thoughts are. Yeah. Look, media's changed, right? There was a time, some people in this room are too young to recall, when you got the news in the morning in newsprint on your doorstep, and if you wanted the news at night, you turned on the TV and three guys with really good hair could deliver it to you. And that was it. I can't even fathom that now, right? We expect to get whatever information we want, wherever we want it, on any screen handy. That cycle's exhausting, but it's also changed the media business. And in many ways, FCC policy, which oversees some cable systems and broadcast stations, struggles to keep up. But I think that you could have different responses to that. And of late, the FCC's response has been, well, we should let there be more consolidation, because these older forms of media need more heft and scale to compete with everything that's new. I understand the thinking behind that response, but I ultimately reject it. I think we need more competition among news organizations that have journalists that go dig stuff up. And I'm worried that despite all the commentary we have out there in citizen journalism, we actually have less, particularly when it comes to local news. So I'm concerned about the consolidation that we have allowed among broadcasting, though I respect that their model needs to be updated for digital times. So the concern the FCC had had about consolidation was that if there were too many media outlets, in a local area, controlled by the same party, that there wouldn't be enough diversity. So I'll give you an example. Yeah. So just imagine a market, we'll just say Detroit, just for interest. So there used to be policies that said the newspaper couldn't own any of the television stations or radio stations. There used to be policies that said no company could own like half the stations in the market. There used to be policies that restricted owning simultaneously the newspaper or half the stations in the radio stations. We got rid of them. Local media is struggling. We should let them achieve more scale. There's certainly, like I said, an argument that might help them, but I think your objective isn't so much helping them. Your objective is how do you sustain diverse viewpoints? And as the healthiest economies and civil societies are ones with many viewpoints, and by reducing the number of owners of some of those stations and newspapers, I don't know that we've contributed to diversifying newspoints, we've just consolidated them. Well, I guess what do you think are going to be the next steps along those lines? And how should we be thinking about government stepping in in this instance? Well, there are congressional laws that constrain a company from nationally owning more than, I think it's 39% broadcast reach for television households. And there are questions about whether or not that threshold should be raised. There are also questions about whether or not Congress should do it or the FCC should do it. And all of this might feel real tethered at a distance from your reality, but all of this sort of feeds into the system of journalism through which we get local news, because for all the diversity of news sources we reach out to today, all the data suggests that most Americans in this country still get their local news from television and radio. So we've got to figure out how to make sure that those sources remain strong, because learning what's happening in our communities really helps us be good citizens. So over the last at least year, and I'm shifting again to something else, over the last year we've heard the president suggest the possibility of revoking the license of a particular media company, NBC in particular. And purportedly this is because there's criticism, maybe it's felt that that criticism is unwarranted of the president or the administration. That's come up a number of times. How realistic is that kind of a threat? And I guess I'm hoping that you can unpack that for us as well. Alright, we're going to try to find a diplomatic way to do this. Let me take you back about a year ago when I think that threat was first thrown over the Twitter sphere. This is actually a funny item. I brought in a new media policy advisor that day or the day before, and I did what I normally do in the morning, which is drink too much coffee, comb through my email, see what news is available on Twitter, see something the president's written, and I'm like, that's not right. It's not right on so many levels. It's completely, you know, we've got constitutional problems, we don't license networks, we've got dual stations, and I took a swig of my coffee and then just pecked out on Twitter in response. I think my office thought I was drinking something stronger than coffee, but anyway, I wrote not how that works, and then like any kind of wonk, I linked to the, I think 34-page single-spaced FCC manual on broadcast licensing. That's true. And somewhere over the morning, it's like thousands and thousands of people are there, and then suddenly like these cable news networks on the phone, well you come and talk about this, we'll come and talk about this. But in many ways, I think it was a story about what's to come, antagonism towards the news, and I think it's troubling because it's not just about politicians criticizing the news media. I mean, that's as old as time. We had the Alien and Sedition Act shortly after we were founded. President Kennedy described the news as his natural enemies. There's no shortage of episodes in our history where you see administrations complaining about news and journalists, so let's treat that as something that is not uncommon. But what worries me most is when you have government use the tools of its power to try to check on the media that covers whether or not you're abusing that power, and that you don't want government using its tools to prevent media from serving as a check on power. You want media to have the ability to cover, and I think in that threat to take away a license while unfocused and inaccurate and wrong, I think you see that problem, and that leads me concerned. So in the 2016 election, data came out and somewhere around 17% of people under 30 voted. Somewhere in that neighborhood, I know the numbers vary a little bit depending upon which study you look at, but it suggests that people, and maybe many people in this room, feel disenfranchised and don't feel a part of we the people making a difference in our own process, even in the voting booth. As people are thinking in this room or thinking about trying to make a difference, I'm wondering if you have thoughts, maybe they have strong views about net neutrality, maybe their views have evolved since the discussion started. What can they do to make a difference and also how can they feel as if the things that they're doing might have a chance of making a difference? Yeah. Well, I don't have time for anyone's cynicism. I'm a public servant. I like to say I'm an impatient optimist, and I think it's a good way to be. You've got to decide that if you don't speak up, who will? If you don't vote, who will? It is in many ways never been easier to build a movement. We have this online recess, the internet, that part of this is about. We've got a capacity to organize and make noise now that is unprecedented in human history. I think as citizens we need to use it. I don't just want to be lobbied by the biggest corporations in Washington. I want to hear what people think in the middle of the country. And I think there is nothing stopping everyone here from having a bigger voice in Washington. We just got to choose to exercise it. Well, that's great. I can see that we got a whole bunch of questions that came in, and I want to give us an opportunity to answer those questions, and so I will tee it up to our student team to take the voice of the people. Hello. Good afternoon. My name is Jackson Voss. I'm a student here at the Ford School and a member of the STPP certificate program, also here at the Ford School. Hi, and I'm Lindsay Machaki. I'm a chemistry PhD candidate as well as being a student in STPP at the Ford School. We have a few questions from the crowd. You mentioned this earlier in one of your answers, the last mile internet issue. The number that the person here gave is 30 million Americans without reliable high speed internet. I've heard much higher numbers, and I've heard varying numbers. But with respect to this problem, and especially when we're talking about rural tribal lands and also the people who live in urban areas who also don't have reliable access to high speed internet, what needs to be done to connect to these people? And the second part of this question is, would this gap exist or would this gap be as big a problem if we treated the internet more like a traditional utility? So my numbers are from my agency, 24 million people without broadband. That's unacceptable. You don't have a fair shot at modern life. Most of them are in rural America, but not all of them. Some are in urban communities. And if you ask me, one of the things we should really do as a nation with more accuracy and aggression is something pretty simple. We need to map where broadband is and is not in every community in this country. We even need to make it like a citizens project, a citizens project where we all participate. We don't just say whether or not we get service at our home. We all actively hold up our phones and report how many bars we have. What if we like crowdsourced all of that information and we had it with greater accuracy than all the commercial companies that now offer that data to us? Because if we did, we would know with some precision where service is not and what kind of technologies we can address it with. Are you just extending that last mile and making sure a fiber facility reaches further? Or are you dealing with a community that is so far out that we're going to have to look at other technologies and services to reach them? I think that that is an important part of making sure we have success. It sounds really basic, but I think it would be really helpful. One of you could start broadband force. Yeah, I like it. Get out there and do it. All right, so another question. What is the relationship between net neutrality and the current rollback of net neutrality and privacy of consumer content, including metadata about source and destination and not just the content? That's a good question. I mean, these are two things that are just pulsing in Washington right now. You can watch in real time Congress try to figure out what to do with privacy policy and Europe making decisions contemporaneously and California just passed another bill. There's a lot of pressure in Washington to identify what modern privacy policy will look like. Now, with respect to the FCC, there is a little bit of a relationship. It does not touch on the social media platforms, but Congress at the start of 2017 took away our authority to make decisions about broadband privacy. That was regrettable. So now I'm left with a lot of authority to make decisions about telephone call privacy but not broadband privacy. And I hope, no matter where we go or what we do, that we're going to come up with policies that are simple enough all of us can understand them. Because right now, despite what I do professionally, if you read through the privacy policy on any individual website, I mean, it's torture. And I do this professionally. And then, you know, you're asked to tick a box and boy, if you don't read it, you can tick a box and get free shipping. So there it goes, right? And I don't think I'm all that abnormal. So my hope, despite that description of my online ordering, my hope is that we can figure out ways to align our privacy policy across sectors of the economy. So that whatever you expect from a website has something to do with what you expect from your broadband provider and is simple enough that none of us need to be engineers or lawyers to understand it. We have a couple of questions, I think, of particular interest to people here in Michigan. Related to DSRC and connected vehicles. One of the first questions is about whether or not the Internet of Things and connected devices and connected vehicles changes the conversation around that neutrality. But the more specific question is actually about when is the FCC planning to decide between 5G and DRSC as it pertains to its regulatory structure. All right, for the non-spectrum and non-automative nerds in the room. Dedicated short-range communication service. A technology that, with the auto industry, the FCC dreamed up in 1999 or set aside Spectrum 4 in 1999. Wow, a lot's happened since 1999. I mean, if you told me about self-driving cars back then, I wouldn't have believed you. And yet, you know, you've got MCD up the road, things being tested here. We're using LiDAR and radar and cameras and all of these new kind of spectrum bands to try to figure out how to have cars talk to one another. It's actually extremely exciting for this region of the country and for anyone who's on the road. The questions are, does that old service from 1999 still have viability? According to the National Transportation Safety Board, it's going to be a few decades before we could have DSRC in every car, which is a technology that allows cars to talk to one another. And what should our spectrum policy be? I have spoken about this before. Most nations have set aside less spectrum for DSRC. I think it's possible that we could look at that band and try to see if we can accommodate some portion of it for Wi-Fi, some portion of it for auto safety. At the very least, we should start some testing in the lab to see if those things are viable. Above all, I don't think we should try safety, but I also don't think we can leave our spectrum policies stranded in 1999. And I really think that the goal here is not to decide where we're heading, but to do some smart tests in the lab to try to understand what modern auto safety technology looks like with this spectrum and whether or not there can be other uses that are nearby. Should we be narrowing the spectrum of any particular industry right now? That's a loaded question. Because there is only so much spectrum. We have choices to make and you talked about potentially expanding some. Where would we cut? This is the two-minute version of the history of spectrum regulation. We used to set aside our airwaves. Think of it as zoning in our skies for very specific uses. Here, you can do this. You can broadcast only. Here, you can do this for auto safety. Here, you can do this for radio. But then, we decided you know what, maybe we should do less of that setting aside for specific purpose. I mean, maybe I don't know what every airwave should be used for. And we should start auctioning off for flexible use. As long as we can manage your interference, can we just let the marketplace figure it out? That worked out pretty well because you all have a mobile device in your pocket. And it's based on that principle. Now going forward, the problem is, oh my gosh, everyone wants some. Like you said, you've got these laws of physics. Can you overwhelm them and suddenly do more with our airwaves? Well, yeah, we're experimenting with really high millimeter band airwaves that don't propagate far but have lots of capacity. We require many more sort of micro towers. I think what we actually have to do is get much more creative about sharing and come up with things like dynamic frequency sharing. So think about it this way. Instead of saying this spectrum is for your wireless phone or uses and this is for Wi-Fi, what if we created like a hierarchy of rights? I said, you know, this use is such a priority and involves safety or national defense. You get preemptive right. If someone's not using it, maybe we can license off a secondary right. And then maybe if no one's using it still, could we have opportunistic use for Wi-Fi? In other words, we're not going to expand the physics, but can we be more efficient with the ways we distribute our airwaves? I'll take it even another step further. We could do that with databases or we could even look at new distributed ledger technologies like blockchain. So there, that's super buzzy. But I do think we're going to have to start evolving spectrum policy to think about it. But we got to recognize there's some public safety uses that are going to be primary. But maybe we can come up with systems of rights that are not just exclusively you or them but create opportunities for all of us to quite literally share the road. So at times then in that model, in that hybrid model where lots of us are using the same frequencies I might get throttled back. Well, we're going to create terms of use, you know, spectrum that would manage your expectations in those environments that are different. And when you use on licensed spectrum like for instance if you use the 2.4 GHz band here to connect, you might have the expectation you'd fall off the Wi-Fi. There are different services that you build different expectations for. Neat. So our next question is what is your perspective on local publicly owned broadband such as what's in Chattanooga and what role do you think that could play in ensuring an accessible and open internet? Yeah, that's a great question. So what's the future of municipal broadband? In about half the states in this country, the state legislature has prohibited it. I think that's regrettable. It's not that it's easy or the right solution for every jurisdiction. It's expensive to finance, construct and maintain a network. There's a reason that there are experts in that. It's hard stuff and every city or state may not be up to that task. But I am struck by this. We've got some communities in this country that feel that they do not have adequate broadband service. It's like the train passing them by in another era. They're not going to be able to sustain their economic future if they don't do something. And if their inclination is to come together just like their forebears did to build roads or bridges or barns, maybe broadband is consistent with that. And I think for those who feel like the digital era is passing them by and they need some solution, I think it's unfortunate that those state laws largely prohibited them from doing so. All right. Delving back into some net neutrality related questions because we have several. We have some questions from people I think who are wondering about whether or not the ability to charge for internet service providers to charge could be of some utility. So the question specifically is based on the infrastructure analogy what makes a toll for an internet passage if you were going to use the toll to pay for cyber security different from paying for infrastructure for example. And also why shouldn't providers be able to charge a little to distribute things that they don't have? So one thing, one example that we got is for pornographic websites which make up a massive amount of the internet shouldn't providers be able to charge a little to distribute this kind of stuff is the question. I think you're going to always come up with use cases that seem plausible but the problem is the ones that seem plausible to you may not seem plausible to them or him or her. And what you really want in the end is the consumer online experience and we are ceding a lot of authority to our broadband providers to allow them to make that decision and in an environment where they don't have a lot of competition I'm not sure we want to give them that authority and control and not have a voice in it. Before you dive in with the next question you talked about this before and I just want to tease it out a little bit because I do think we already don't have a lot of control. We have the service provider that we have. I think what you're saying is and you should correct me please is if we don't have net neutrality to provide some signposts, some guidance, some constraint what we have every reason to expect is that over time broadband providers will do things that create economic advantage like forming relationships and speeding up some traffic and slowing down other traffic. And I think the challenge for us right now is while there are individual examples of people doing that either we haven't noticed it that much or we're just counting on the fact that people will behave the way that we or companies will behave the way we expect them to. I think that's fair. I think this is why it's hard to make the net neutrality argument when you're sitting across the table from somebody because they're saying I don't see fire and brimstone here. We were talking about this earlier that the University of Massachusetts and Northeastern University they're now doing some testing including I think students download an app to try to test how fast they can get to certain video websites. Does it indicate reasonable traffic management which would entail treating like services is the same or does it involve some kind of bias for or against certain content and you know this is an interesting university campus to try to do that kind of experimenting on as well and it's important that we as consumers and as citizens start paying attention to those things and developing ways to test what's happening. Another thing I'll mention just along these lines is you when you think about how we don't have an enormous amount of evidence that this is how companies will conduct themselves you do have to take some time to imagine what it will be like if they already have that is in a world where they're unconstrained and now when the government comes in and says oh it turns out we're seeing the problems that we might have anticipated now it looks a whole lot more like a taking because they've invested and the infrastructure has changed and it becomes disruptive and you know what gets even harder is as we've transferred some oversight for this to the Federal Trade Commission their tool is to take someone to court I've at least got sort of the ability to make rules and say you can do this you can't do this but taking someone to court is addressing the harm after it's occurred and the judicial system doesn't move all that fast and like if you're a small website or a small business I mean do you have the resource time and energy to come to Washington go file a complaint with the FTC follow up identify if it's something that is similar to other complaints they've received such that you can put pressure on them to go to the judicial system and get you resolution which might take two years like to me that's irrational for small businesses in this country and just setting up a clear set of rules works a lot better for them so it's another reason I think there's a pro-business side to having that neutrality rules in place that's underappreciated we talk strictly about broadband providers and infrastructure but we should also recognize that small businesses rely on online activity and online growth in ways that are extraordinary and we should seek to create public policy to grow sorry for jumping in again alright so we have a few questions here that are kind of all related to the fake news conversation so does the FCC have any role in regulating accuracy and truth on the internet get that out check that one out so but in the wake of the net neutrality discussion why shouldn't internet service providers have the right to block concerning or offensive content or fake news and kind of the flip side of that are what are the implications of having net neutrality if they do choose to exercise that power on freedom of speech and equal access of information yeah the first question was easy the second one is really sophisticated you know so much of our town square right now takes place digitally and we have offered a lot of control and authority to online platforms and I think we would compound some of the problems we have by offering them that same authority to our broadband providers to choose where we can go and what we can see and what we can't see even if that authority is exercised with the best of intentions we'll get rid of disinformation we'll get rid of fake news I don't have full confidence that they can exercise that appropriately under all circumstances and I worry about providing them with that authority and it would be that it constrains all of our ability to go out and get the information we're looking for this is why we teach critical thinking at the University of Michigan is so you have the opportunity to decide for yourself when you need more information maybe if we can proliferate a little more of that it will be productive for society sounds good this next question comes to us from twitter and this question concerns corporate mergers such as AT&T and Time Warner where internet service providers are also becoming content and distribution and production companies as well how does net neutrality change the applications of these kinds of mergers good question I should say at the outset it was the Department of Justice that reviewed that transaction so I didn't have a role but what you're seeing is the combination of distribution and communications and content so if you think about it with net neutrality they couldn't create ways in which that distribution was biased towards their own content because that would be treating content in a discriminatory way but now without net neutrality policies in place there's a lot of corporate incentive to make sure your network is biased towards the content that your company owns downloads faster is exempt from data caps is offered to you free of charge and so your viewership of it might increase and your viewership of other voices other content might decrease so I do think there's a net neutrality conversation to be had there and that the combination of content and distribution has consequences especially in a world without net neutrality in place alright so next question is kind of playing off of California's net neutrality but asking if this was from the internet service providers do you think it is possible and is it possible functionally and legally for an internet service provider to say we are going to provide net neutrality to certain consumers either for a fee or based on some sort of bias so this would be a world in which net neutrality was available to all of us but for a fee I believe that they would have the right to do that but the FCC changed its policies the California law you described would make that complex in California I'm pretty sure our court is going to sort all of that out not me right here but yes sorry just checking the time so we have a couple of questions about encouraging broadband competition in your view what are some ways that broadband competition could be encouraged from the perspective of the FCC but also I think just more in general we need to be identifying every way we can encourage competition and some of them are really mundane but consequential every state in the country should have dig once policies which means when you rip up the roads you should make sure that everyone knows so that they can lay down fiber facilities at that one time it turns out it only adds 1% to the cost of construction projects in the virtue of making it known to everyone that they can lay fiber facilities down we can radically increase the likelihood that there's more competition over time because ripping up the road is expensive so take advantage of ongoing road construction we've made some changes to our access to telephone poles again these are not the sexiest issues but figuring out how to make sure other providers can get access to them not just the incumbents and make sure a minimum of bureaucracy will increase opportunities for competition but I think the biggest and most consequential ones come with technology change because the economics behind network deployment right now are pretty hard if you've got millions and millions of people in a square mile I'm pretty convinced the cost for serving every one of those customers is manageable but you move to a rural location it's harder and harder for business cases to be made to serve all those customers and so the FCC has some support systems to try to help those providers to make it more financially viable but over the long haul we're going to need new technologies and I do think that fifth generation wireless you probably hear about 5G all the time is probably going to have many times more the capacity that our current wireless has right now and will become a more viable competition to traditional home broadband I think that is probably the most exciting thing on the landscape for broadband competition but it's not satisfying because it's still a little far off so our next question asks about how closely the FCC commission works with network engineers when you are determining your policy we do have a pretty big office of engineering and technology but I believe it's not big enough I actually advocated for several years in front of an organization first in front of an organization the IEEE so engineering organization that the agency needs to start an engineering honors program which is like go to schools like this one and say can we entice you to come for a two year tour of duty in Washington as an engineer and bring in young engineers and cycle them through and maybe they'll go off and do other exciting things in industry over time or they'll continue in public service but we got to find more on ramps to bring engineers to government across the board we need more digital natives serving in government we need more people who see opportunities with digital technology and not just sort of new bureaucratic headaches for new systems we need more alright I think this will be our last question for the evening in your opinion could internet access be considered a human right if so what would be the argument for that yeah this is a question I feel like you get asked from time to time and I'll be honest with you I'm not sure how you classify it matters so much as this you do not have a fair shot at prosperity in the 21st century if you do not have access to the internet and I think if we can agree on that proposition that is the most important thing so figuring out how we get more people connected in more places at higher speeds in ways that are open I think it's going to be the ticket to our civic and commercial success in the future and it needs to be a focus of our national policy makers across the board well thank you so much you've really been indulgent with your time and with your conversation partner such good questions we really appreciate you coming out please join me in thanking our wonderful panel we're going to go right from here to a reception outside you'll have a chance to talk to the commissioner more informally just outside and hope you enjoy it thank you