Transcripts For CSPAN British House Of Commons 20140120 : vi

Revolution is making business more competitive to try to win the global race. That is a proper plan for the economy. Order. [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2013] [captioning performed by national captioning institute] been watching the prime ministers questions from the british house of commons. You can also watch any time online at cspan. Org. Tomorrow at 11 00 a. M. Eastern, we will have evan sayet. He spoke recently at the conservative forum of Silicon Valley on his views on liberals and the news media. Here is a brief portion from the event. Is the Mainstream Media has the Mainstream Media. In every major story of our not just wrong, but as wrong as wrong can be . This let me begin to prove by pointing out one of the good guys. Chance to gett a rid stevens, he is an editorial writer for the wall street journal. Many years back, he wrote a piece that began something posted this. Historian looking back at the contemporary journalism leading up to the major events of our lifetime, looking for clues in that reporting as to the major events that were about to transpire will have found that reporting to be mostly useless. Stevens is wrong. He is wrong and that he does not go anywhere near far enough. That reporting was not just useless, but anybody who looked for clues at the time wanting to know what might come next around the world will have been led to anticipate exactly the opposite of what actually came to be. Think of our news media as our personal intelligence agencies. They have operatives in the field, reporters sending back dispatches, articles. Us with information, inside information so we can make good personal policy. Fair enough . Anybody who trusted the bs,nstream media, abc, nbc, c time, newsweek, the New York Times everybody but fox. I am going to put fox to the side for a moment. We will talk about fox. Anybody who trusted the Mainstream Media as a source for intelligence not only got useful useless intelligence, they got intelligence that was diametrically opposed to the truth. You can watch the entire speakingh evan sayet about liberals and the media tomorrow on cspan. Tomorrow, the next program in our first ladies Series Features barbara bush. In the white house, she focused on the issue of literacy, creating a foundation in her name that was dedicated to the cause. As matriarch of the bush family, she has earned the reputation of being the enforcer, a title she says she deserves. Learn more about barbara bush and watch our recent interview when first ladys heirs tomorrow at 9 00 p. M. Eastern on cspan. Or a preview, go to our Facebook Page to see clips from our interview with the former first lady. We have also posted a question about family dynasties and the presidency and whether the office is better served for someone new. Go to cspan. Com to leave your comments. Cspan. We bring Public Affairs events from washington directly to you, putting you in the room at congressional hearings, white house events, readings and conferences, and offering complete coverage of the u. S. House, all as a public service. We are cspan, created by the cable tv industry 35 years ago and funded by your local cable or satellite provider. Watch us in hd, like us on facebook, and follow us on twitter. Next, a discussion about the future of the internet. Following a federal court ruling last week that said the fcc improperly tried to regulate Broadband Internet providers with a Net Neutrality rule that tries to ensure that all content providers had equal access to internet subscribers and vice versa. This was posted by the congressional internet caucus advisory committee. It is one hour and 15 minutes. [inaudible conversations] welcome. Thank you for coming. Todays briefing is about the Internet Committee titled Circuit Court decision on fcc open internet roles is it random or is it a law. Such short notice the decision came on tuesday. Weve been awaiting it and wanted to do a briefing as close to the decision as possible. This is the congressional internet caucus advisory committee. We take no position on legislation or regulation but the proposition that the internet is extremely important and that we should try to insure a sound Decision Making so what we try to do in these meetings is any issue that affects the internet, we try to have a balanced perspective. A lot of perspectives on the issue and have a collegial issue on the topic. The socalled Net Neutrality rules lend itself to that type of debate. Hosted in conjunction with the congressional internet caucus and its cochairs, congressman bob goodlatte, congresswoman eshoo and senator leahy has less senator thune. I applaud the caucus for hosting the dates that pose a variety of perspectives on important issues with which they themselves may not agree so i want to applaud them for that. Hash tag for today is netneutrality and this is just the start of the conversation on the fcc open internet rules. The moderator today is david stone, general counsel for democracy and technology. David works for the center of technology, which is a Civil Liberties First Amendment organization. And david has agreed to try to moderate this as impartial and in as fair manner as possible. So i will hand it over to david stone. Thank you. Neutral, you might even say, tim. Thanks to the Internet Education Foundation for pulling this together as promptly. As tim said it was to stay the Court Decision came out, so it should be a great opportunity to get some initial analysis and initial reactions to the case means. As tim mentioned, im going to moderate. I will try to be impartial. We filed a brief in the case and that is why he mentioned that. To introduce the panelists to my left we have marked who is a partner at johnson and general counsel to the internet association, then we have got Christopher Yoo professor of law, communication and Information Science at the University Pennsylvania law school. To his left is matt wood policy director and free press and to his left is Russell Hanser at wilkins and barker and hamilton nbc. What i would like to do is offer a background of the fcc open internet rules and on a recent Court Decision, then i will turn it over to questions for the panelists. So in terms of background, theres been an active policy debate over what is often termed internet. Org at neutrality going on for quite a few years. As most of you know it is a debate that centers on whether broadband providers of Internet Access, the Internet Connections that people use to get online, with the should be required to carry all traffic in a fundamentally neutral manner, without any kind of interference or favoritism. Or on the other hand, theyre imposing this kind of requirements would be unnecessary, or would impose actually harmful consequences for the carriers ability to run their networks and run their businesses. Back in december of 2010, after a long set of proceedings and multiple rounds of public comments, the fcc adopted a set of rules on the topic which it called the open internet rules, and those devotee main components. There was a nondiscrimination requirement, there was in no walking requirement and there was a transparency requirement. Now, the blocking rules prohibited broadband providers from blocking access to the lawful online content service. The nondiscrimination rule prohibited broadband providers from engaging in unreasonable discrimination among the online content and services. But interestingly, that rural exempted the mobile providers. So that was for Internet Access only. And then the transparency world require them to provide Public Disclosure regarding their Network Management practices. Now, after the fcc put out rules, verizon challenged them in court and they made a number of arguments including that the rules or arbitrary and capricious, said they were impermissible under the Communications Act and even that they were unconstitutional. This past tuesday we finally got a d. C. Circuit decision that struck down the rules pertaining to the blocking and discrimination. It didnt lead to transparency rules in place. The court held that the act does give the fcc some authority over broadband providers. But it concluded that the antiblocking and antidiscrimination rules are inconsistent with the fcc previous decision to treat broadband providers as Information Services under the Communications Act. Without getting into too much detail on that point, i think the details of the statutory framework are important here that the Communications Act establishes two broad categories of services. Telecommunications services, which he will sometimes hear referred to as title ii services because they are regulated under the information act, and Information Services. And the law also has a provision that says that providers of Information Service and providers in that category shall not be treated as a common carrier, which is a term that has a long history in the common law. And the core of the courts ruling on tuesday was that the antiblocking and the antidiscrimination rules amount to the common carrier for rules. And that means that the fcc cannot impose the inside looking and antidiscrimination on Information Services, which is exactly what the fcc had previously said broadband Service Providers are. So, in fact, there is a level at which the court was saying that the fcc cannot have it both ways. They cant decide that prague and is Information Service and then turn around and impose the kind of nondiscrimination requirements that have characterized the common carriage. With that background, i would like to turn the discussion over to the panelists. I think i would like to start with just the question of where exactly this decision leaves the concept of Net Neutrality and nondiscrimination on the internet. Is there any leeway for the fcc to call for some form of nondiscrimination or is that now basically totally out of bounds in the wake of this decision, i will start with whoever would like to start off on that. And full disclosure i do represent an intervenor in the case, intervening on the side of the fcc, the coalition. So, you know, as a matter of law, the decision means that there are no rules currently that would preclude bup internet Broadband Access provider from discriminating against the content or even blocking content. The court did uphold the transparency rule which means the Broadband Internet access still has information about the Broadband Internet access practices. Procedurally, the decision can be appealed to the full d. C. Circuit. Within 30 days if you are an intervenor for the government, it can later be appealed to the supreme court. And there is nothing of course to stop the fcc from animating several of the pockets that are currently pending around the Net Neutrality to do this. The court did uphold that the fcc has Broad Authority to come up with rules that would prevent them from blocking content, but there still has to be room to allow Broadband Internet providers to differentiate different content and to avoid being classified as common carriers. As a comedy severely limited in that regard what the advocates have typically thought of as Net Neutrality rules. And if the fcc wanted to, it still has an open dhaka to classified abroad and Internet Services or some Internet Access service as a title to common Carrier Service in order to adopt nondiscrimination rule. So they do the title to classification. The fcc is precluded from the rule and the classical affect is that they can then charge providers new grant that hasnt been charged before to ensure that those providers can reach the subscribers for different tiers of service and Video Service to ensure that a video provider has ample bandwidth to be able to reach the subscribers and if theoretically, they could certainly block the content that the isp felt was not appropriate for their subscriber to it so i think there will be some action, but what that action will be is not clear. It is a fascinating set of questions. I think that the theme of for this session is was it a win over a loss and i think the answer is yes. Everyone found something to like in the decision and everything to hate in the decision. I think the fcc Worst Nightmare was on the goal to say that they had no authority whatsoever. And in that sense, the d. C. Circuit agreed, and yes, the fcc still will regulate the internet. The second part of it is has the fcc exercised its authority in the proper way . And when we see words like common carriage and a title ii at the risk of oversimplifying, and anytime you boil things down, its the old rules that apply to the Telephone Network going to be applied. And what the d. C. Circuit decision says is no. When you exercise the authority, you are not allowed to send these old rules developed from the 1934 act for a different type of context to the internet. And in that sense, that is the part that they have. And what they say is that it leaves very little room to bring in the Service Aspects of that regime. They will still explore them. And to offer predictions, one of the questions is in the appeal to the d. C. Circuit. This consisted of two democrats and republican. Currently my guess is this is i know nothing about the parties, they are probably not going to get a different result. They dont like taking cases that dont have the authority on one side or the other side you might think because its politically important and taking a lot of attention, they might take it in my experience, you would be surprised. Sometimes the political nature causes the court to stay away from it, so there is a pretty good chance it wont happen. And if that is the case, then frankly, it is at the end of this long road that we have had where we are all waiting for the court to decide and the politics proceeded and it all became law. We are going to see the return of the congress rules and overlooking what should come next and the agency has a much more active role not going to happen. And if we turn it back to the policymaking relevance of waiting for the court to decide. I guess we will keep trooping down. Thanks so much for having me here. I want to go back to one thing that chris said and two points that are sort of in the name of the panel in the way that david said this at the outset. A little technical here but i would say that its not that the fcc cant apply the common carrier rules using the power it has. It cant apply common rules using the power it chose to use here. And that is because as mark mengin, the fcc could go back and say you know, we are wrong. We are changing our mind. Circumstances have changed, what everyone to use for justification and say that Broadband Internet Access Services should indeed be title ii services or common Carrier Services. Theres a lot of jargon here but they are all basically the same thing. They could treat those Services Like the Internet Access that you and i have today like a common Carrier Service by classifying it as such, and then we would have a very different conversation about authority. And just to put it out there what we in the free press think the fcc should do there is a lot of debate about that. To agree with what chris said, there is a lot of political to come over that and the fcc action and the court action following up on that as well. So, never over until its over and even then, its not over. The fcc thats one thing i heard one time. Back quickly to the question as david raised and the panel put it, it is a win for the fcc. Kress said yes, they win a lot. I would say that it is not neutrality. The rules are vacated and i think it is pretty clear that the fcc cannot reinstate them in any queen and understandably and frankly useful way for protecting Internet Users using the authority that theyve been left. It is all for the Net Neutrality but its not a total loss for the fcc to have some power and to have some authority to regulate Broadband Internet access. Released to the word though to regulate access. Thats what we think the nec neutrality rules do is to protect your access to the internet. As chris said, theres been some companies saying this, too. The 706 route protect the at the court stands up and the fcc has authority. That could allow them to regulate the internet,