Traffic equally. She says text for the policy can be expected in the coming days. The fcc voted for the Net Neutrality in 2015 during the obama administration. It was repealed in 2017 under president trump. This is 25 minutes. [inaudible conversations] i think we are going to get started. People can take their seats. Could folks take their seats if they can . Im from the fcc office of media relations. Just so you know, we will be posting a fact sheet about the proposal and text of the chairwomans remarks and with no further ado, let me introduce chairwoman rosenworcel. Thanks, will and thank you, everyone, for being here. You know, it was more than three years ago when the covid virus reached our shores and upended daytoday life. I dont know if you remember those early days, but i thought it was bewildering. We were told to stay home, hunker down and live life online. So i grabbedy what i thought ws important at work and i moved my office to my dining room table. At home i kept changing the location of the wifi router feverishly trying to identify the sweet spot where the signal would reach everyone in my family. We had two parents, two kids, two jobs and a crowded house with all of us on the internet all the time. It was a lot. And we wereky lucky because so many others were digitally disconnected. We had people sitting in cars in parking lots to catch a free wifi signal for work and healthcare appointments. We had a kids lingering outside of fast food restaurants with laptops just to go online for class. S we had to cities and towns fearful they would never thrive without new efforts to extend broadband to their residence and businesses. As a nation, we responded to this crisis with extraordinary action. We made a historic commitment to broadband for all. Congress invested tens of billions of dollars into building Internet Networks and making access more affordable and equitable, culminating in an investment of 65 billion in the bipartisan infrastructure law. The fcc is a big part of that effort to close the digital divide, and that includes our efforts to map where broadband is and is not all across the country, and ouran efforts to assist 21 million households gettingg online and staying online through the Affordable Connectivity Program. But, you know the pandemic to do Something Else. It made Crystal Clear that broadband is no longer just nice to have. Its needed to have for everyone, everywhere. Its not a luxury, its a necessity. It is essential infrastructure forra modern life. No one without it has a fair shot at a 21st century success. We need broadband to reach 100 of us, and we needed to be fast, open and fair. Yet, even as our society reconfigured itself to so much online, our institutions havent always kept up. Today, there is no Expert Agency ensuring that the internet is fast,ri open and fair. Since the birth of the modern internet, the fcc has played that role and if you think about it, it makes sense. These are principles that have deep origins and Communications Law and history. After all, back in the era when communications meant telephony, each and every call went through and the phone company could not cut you off from your call or decided to edit the content of your conversation. Now, fastforward to the present. Communications means a whole lot more than just phone calls. It means access to the internet because broadband is the most important infrastructure of our time. But as a result of the previous fcc decision to abdicate authority, the Agency Charged with overseeing communications has limited ability to oversee these and dispensable networks and make sure that for every consumer their access is fast, open and fair. I think thats not right. Because for everyone, everywhere, to enjoy the full benefits of the internet age, Internet Access should be more than just accessible and affordable. The internet needs to be open, and thats what i want to talk about today. The internets open design is revolutionary. Its right there at its foundation. It means creating without permission, Building Community beyondon geography, organizing without physical constraints, consuming content where you want it and when you want it to me and cultivating ideas not just around the corner, but across the globe. I believe it is essential that we sustain the foundation of openness, and thats why since i have served at the fcc, ive always supported Net Neutrality. At this point i think it is worth acknowledging that Net Neutrality is one of the most widely discussed issues in telecommunications policy. But the debate around it often yields more heat than light. So, im going to keep my comments on the history here short, but focus on the basics. Rollback before the pandemic. Before the smart phone era, but for the Washington Football Team called itself the commanders. Lets start in 2005. That is when the fcc adopted its first open internet policy statement that was built on policy, but it had long been in communications, law and history. The agency made clear that when it came to Net Neutrality, consumers should expect that the broadband providers would not block, throttle or engage in paid prioritization of internet traffic. In other words, your broadband provider had no business cutting off access to websites, slowing down Internet Services and censoring online speech. Your broadband provider was not allowed to play favorites like steering you fast to some Online Service that had given them a payout and assigning you to a bumpy road for those who had not offered the same pay. As a consumer, you can go where you want and do what you want without your broadband provider getting in the way or making choices for you. After ten years of policymaking and what i think when i count three rounds of litigation, in 2015, the fcc finally, finally adopted Net Neutrality protections that were upheld by the courts. The fcc had produced open internet policies that passed judicial muster. We had clear rules of the road and those rules were popular. 80 of americans support open internet and Net Neutrality policies. So, this looked like it was going to be the end of the Net Neutrality saga, but not so. Because in 2017, the last administration took it up again and did something different. It announced that it would break with over a decade of consistent fcc policy and repeal the fccsh open internet rule, the ones that were held up by the court. L now, the public backlash was overwhelming. Maybe you remember it. People lit up our phone line, our email boxes and jammed our online Comment System to express their disapproval. And despite this overwhelming opposition from the public, the fcc repealed netit neutrality. In fact, the actions were so extreme the United States senate voted to restore the agencies open internet protection. Now i believe this repeal of Net Neutrality put thehe fcc on the wrong side of history and the law and the wrong side of the american public. It was not a good then and it makes even less sense now. It determined that the infrastructure, which the pandemic approved is essential for modern life needs no oversight and i think that is just wrong so today we begin the process to make it right. I amm sharing with my colleagues a rulemaking that proposes to reinstate Net Neutrality. This is the first step. We will invite Public Comments about how restoring Net Neutrality rules can help ensure Internet Access is fast, open and fair. N we need an updated record to identify thes best way to restoe these policies and have a uniform national openrd internet standard. I recognize that we are kicking off the rulemaking and that will be the headline today but while i have your attention there Something Else i want to share about the process and policy today. The repeal of Net Neutrality rule was problematic not only because it wiped away and forcible breitling policies to prevent blocking, throttling and paid prioritization. It was problematic because the Agency Reversed the decision to oversee broadband as an Internet AccessTelecommunications Service under title ii of theth Communications Act. It had a lot of downstream consequences and i think we should talk about them. The last sentence is complicated and i realize if you are not from washington its a little hard to unpack so let me do it for you. Title ii is the part of the law that gives they fcc authority to serve as a watchdog over the Communications Marketplace and look out for the publics interest. A title ii took on special importance in the Net Neutrality debate because the courts ruled that the fcc has Clear Authority to enforce open internet policies if Broadband Internet is classified as a title ii service and providing a Strong Foundation for Net Neutrality rules is a good reason to support classifying Broadband Internet as a title ii service. But again there are downstream consequences that flow from the agency retreating from title ii and they need attention so let me explain. Back to the pandemic. It made clear broadband is a central infrastructure for modern life, access to the internet is now access to everything and common sense tells us the nations leading Communications Watchdog should have the muscle it needs to protect consumers and make sure their Internet Access is fast, open and fair. Common sense also tells us a thing or two about the state of competition inin the broadband marketplace. Im a big believer in the power of competitive markets to drive innovation investments and consumer benefits. But i also recognize the high cost makes competition a challenge in many places. That is why almost half of us have highspeed service 100 megabits per second download speeds and only half of us can get it for more than a single provider. Only one fifth of the country has more than two choices at this speed so if your broadband provider messes around with your ability to go where you want and do what you want you cant just pick up and take your business to another provider. That provider may be the only game in town. You need a referee on the field looking out for the Public Interest and ensuring that access is fast, open and fair. One issue after issue, classifying broadband is a title ii service would help serve the Public Interest more efficiently and effectively. Lets start with Public Safety. The decision to rollback Net Neutrality, the court found the agencys disregard of the duty to analyze the impact to Public Safety renders the decision arbitrary and capricious. I agree. The record before the court demonstrated when a fire the firefighters in Santa Clara California were desponding to wildfires they discovered the Wireless Connectivity on the command vehicle was being throttled. As a result of the title to repealdn the fcc didnt have any authority to intervene and fix it. It would also bolster authority to require Service Providers to address internet outages. I heard about the village a neighborhood of nearly 7,000 people that suffered through a 45 day internet outage during the pandemic with little recourse. Remember when the fcc backed away from overseeing broadband, it meant that the only mandatory outage reporting system we could have in place was focused on longdistance voice outages. Let me submit to you in a modern economy during the pandemic collecting only datait about whn a voice system goes down doesnt cut it. Look at National Security. The fcc has taken a series of bipartisan actions to reduce dependence on Insecure Communications equipment and to keep potentially hostile actors from connecting to our networks. This is good but not enough to keep our adversaries at bay. Today when we take away authorization to provide service from state affiliated companies who may wish to do us harm we is known asat section 214 authority but remember thanks to the retreat from title ii in the last administration that doesnton cover broadband. This is a National Security loophole that needs to be addressed. And look at cybersecurity the fcc is involved in federal interagencyy cybersecurity planning coordination and response activities. You want the agency with knowledge to be sitting at that table but without the classification they had limited authority to incorporate updated cybersecurity standards. Then look at Network Resilience and reliability. We want to make sure our Communications Networks hold up during emergency situations like natural disasters. A title i could help us better monitor the degradation of service in times of emergency with a kind of required outage reporting mentioned earlier. Then look at privacy hear the law requires telecommunication providers to protect the confidentiality of the proprietary information of their customers. That means the providers cannot sell your location data among other sensitive information. The privacy protections currently extend to Food Service Customers but not broadband becauseii title ii doesnt cover the latter. Do we want our broadband providers selling where we go w and what we do online . Scraping our service for a payday from new Artificial Intelligence models . Doingur any of this without our permission . And look at broadband deployment. As a nation, we are committed post pandemicg to building broadband for all so keep in mind that when you construct these facilities, utility poles are important. Title ii gives cable and phone companies the rights to attach their facilities to utility poles when they deploy service. But when the fcc rules back its open internet rules, it eliminated the attachment rights of broadband will be providers and if you want to build out and competition, this is not good. It needs to be fixed. Along with robo calls text as a source of Consumer Complaint at the fcccc and one thing we have learned about the bad actorse behind this is that they are continuously evolving their technologies to reach out with their scams and fraud. Title ii authority would give us the maximum flexibility to counter this unit evolve our approaches as technology changes. The fccs actively engaged in all ofe these issues but at tims it can require duct tape and bailing wire to jerry rig to make sure all the actions are on sound legal footing. It doesnt always work and it renders unnecessarily vulnerable the most important security objective. At the reclassification of the title ii service would make the worke more efficient and consumers more confident that their Internet Access is fast, open and fair. On top of this, restoring the open internet policies would mean that a uniform Legal Framework applies to the whole country. If you think that nothing much thhas happened since the fcc retreated from the Net Neutrality policies and are asking yourself whats the big deal, think again then look harder it when they step back from having the policies in place, the court said that the states could step in so when washington withdrew my california went in with its own regime and other states. They put Net Neutrality rules and states, walls and executivee orders and contracting policies. So in effect we have open policies providers are abiding by right now they are just coming from sacramento and places like it but when you are dealing with the most essential infrastructure in the digital age we benefit from having a nationaly. Policy. All of this means we are choosing between Net Neutrality and no rules, that is a false choice because what we are discussing ison having one National Standard or a patchwork of state regulation. Having gonee through this before i know there is a small but vocal chorus of those that are already raising their objections. They say title ii is heavyhanded and if we are seeking comment on anything like applying the broadband in its inentirety i would say they hava point, but we are not doing that. We are approaching it with a light touch. In 2015 when the fcc laughed at the policies upheld by the court, the fcc chose to. C forber 27 provisions of title ii of the Communications Act and over 700 Agency Regulations for broadband and broadband providers. We are sticking with that approach. They say this is a stocking rate regulation. No, n