President obama not in washington dc this week. And australia. Ia his First Official stop is today for the economic conference. He will meet chinese president xi jinping. On friday at bilateral meeting with the burmese president and a separate meeting with the Opposition Leader there. He is expected to deliver a major policy address. On his keep you updated trip here on the cspan networks. Awaiting action in the house, federal spending for the 2014 fiscal spending. New members begin orientation on senatey and then in the votes are expected on judicial nominations and a childcare block program. You can watch the house live here on cspan and the senate on our companion network. The secretary Veterans Administration is set to announce a Major Overhaul to make it easier for millions of patients to seek care. The department is going to aim to simplify the process of getting into the system, streamlining any streamlining nine different structures. Thatecretary acknowledged employees must be cleared out. The v. A. Could see a major hirings re. Needs the higher 28,000 health care workers. The people who oppose should take a look at the itv header. That is the magic that makes the internet to work. There is something called a type of service flag. Those designed to be on the internet from the beginning. They not only kept that, they included another field to do another form of prioritization. It was never intended to be allowed. I think a little engineering knowledge goes a long way. If you talk to the way people are use in the network, they are using it to deliver their voices. Tonight at 8 00 eastern on the communicators. Cspan veterans day coverage begins Tuesday Morning at 8 30 eastern during washington journal with an interview with American Legion executive director bernard jones. We are live at 11 from Arlington National sarah cemetery for the traditional wreathlaying ceremony at the tomb of the unknown. A discussion on Veterans Mental Health issues afternoon. Here are just a few of the comments we recently received from our viewers. Watched your show on Domestic Violence and was very disappointed with what i saw and heard. I thought the guests were weak and ineffectual. Seems that the bulk of callers were a bunch of whiny men. One woman is beaten every 15 seconds in this country by a husband or partner. That is one woman every 15 seconds. This issue is swept under the rug in this country, partly because most of the perpetrators are male. The only way this will ever change is if men are willing to look at their own bad behavior theyess it headon are talkg about harry reids desk each and every one of those cells have a repeal of what they call obama care. It would be good, rather than having democrats and republicans at a time, lets democrats and republicans fight it out. Call us, email us, or you can send us a tweet. Oin the conversation like us on facebook. Or follow us on twitter. Next, a look at the Net Neutrality. The fcc is considering a plan that would allow the agency to regulate how internet flows between content providers and Service Providers. A final ruling is expected by the end of the year. At issue is whether Service Providers will give access to all content. Columbia University Professor tim wu is credited with creating the term Net Neutrality and he took part in a discussion in new york city. It is just over an hour. I am delighted to now introduce the board of trustees, jacob weisberg, who has been involved in the internet before we knew what it was since 1996. He has been a pioneer in the field and what we talked about how to take on the topic including experts and people who see Net Neutrality and their eyes glazed over and we got the perfect person. Jacob weisberg so over to you. Thank you. I want to thank the fordham system for sponsoring this event. We are going to do way better than have your eyes glaze over. Well have this interesting and lively on a very urgent issue. I want to briefly introduce the panel and then give them a chance to make Opening Statements and will mix it up and save time for questions. I will start with my old friend micah sifry and i know him going back to when he was a writer for the nation. That he works for the Democracy Forum author of a new book called the big disconnect. I agree with the premise. To my left is tim wu, you may recognize him from his recent unsuccessful yet widely Successful Campaign for Lieutenant Governor with 39 of the vote. 40 . With no background in politics. His background is slate writer. He is the author of the master switch the rise and fall of information empires. Relevant for today, he coined the term Net Neutrality and no discussion of it is complete without his perspective. And next to him, jeffrey manney. Until recently, a law professor and now he runs an organization that he founded, i will have to put my reading glasses. International center for law and economics based in portland, oregon. For the first round here, i would like each of you to be as neutral and descriptive and diagnostic and explanatory as possible. It is very important to try to have the philosophical perspective and i want to start with you, tim. Explaining where the whole issue of Net Neutrality is and where the idea comes from. Thank you to pen for having us here on an issue of importance and concern. I want to discuss why it is a give somebody historical background. I went to the fcc the other day to go to a hearing, with the chairman, there was a crowd of protesters there. People beating drums. I have to tell you when i started working on this issue in the 2000s, we would be lucky to have 10 people show up. It was an obscure academic issue. Theres a lot of reason why Net Neutrality has become an important issue. I want to describe some of the issues i think. It raises in our time questions of the power of private power in particular, and the exercise thereof. There is discussion in this country whether private power has gone too far. It puts into question the perennial issue of free speech. And the internet has been an incredible engine and some people feel it will be a threat. If there will be a slow line created, and put in place some of the issues of equality or inequality which seem so striking in American Society right now. What feels to many people like Public Infrastructure might work better for some speakers and for other speakers. Both raise questions of free speech and basic sense of equality. We do not have sidewalks for rich people and others for poor people. If you go back into the history of this issue, you date it from as far as you want and i would date it to the nationstate of the idea of Public Infrastructure. One of the things that countries have always done is provide some amount of what you can call infrastructure, essential like roads and bridges and so forth that everyone relies on. All businesses and citizens. For a very long part of human history, we were provided by government, the roman empire builder the roads. Now, that has begin to change particularly in england is spreading to the United States with a model where we would have private actors build what mightve been otherwise they consider public infrasucture. Private innkeepers or private ferry operators and some under regulation or rules they gave the public duties. This is the origins of the idea of a public or common carrier. At some level since the last 500 years, we have been struggling with exactly what the rules should be for these kinds of businesses, which are not private businesses. But somehow invest it with a public function. Its not enough to say that infrastructure, everyone thinks the New York Times or slate seem to be different. When it comes to the internet, a project originally funded by the government. Built in its initial stages by the government and taken over by private companies will stop today, dominated by the private. Its the same rules faced forever when you look in ancient times at bridges and ferries. Should these private operators of what might be described as public facilities have special duties of nondiscrimination delivery of goods or services with special pricing rules . Should they have to give it to everyone and make sure we have it . We are asking, what are the essentials of the 21stcentury . We are asking is the Broadband Internet the same as the electricity was or water. That is the basic introduction. In some ways, it is defining what citizenship is and i will leave it there. I know you wi want to respond. Could you just bring us up to speed on where we are in laymans term on this issue . The fcc has a ruling pding irrespective of the president who is charge express his opinion and public. What where are we on this issue . Ok, briefly, sort of picking up where tim left off. He started with the beginning of the nationstate as fastforward to the 2000. Yada, yada, yada. We have the internet, broadband. Telephones, Telecommunications Services have been regulated by the fcc for many years since 1934. Along comes in this new thing called broadband. Older broadband as you know of course, will we did a lot more than talk to each other. There is no longer a singlepurpose network. Something capable of doing everything at what came to be characterized as an information service. It is important. I decided i was not going to be annoying details. It is important to note under the clinton administration, the first fcc chairman made this determination that we would be better served if broadband was classified as Information Services because it is less regulated than telecommunications. After that decision was made came along challenges to it. The fcc continued on this path and continues to assert broadband was title i less regulation. As the debate on Net Neutrality started to rage on, some people started to suggest we need more regulation for the internet. When michael powell, now chairman of the federal communication under bush, decided it was accurate and from the arguments that others have had said, it was a need to treat the internet differently in different ideals that tim mentioned. He mentioned Internet Freedom, and aspirational set of goals. Content should be treated the same on internet and everybody should have access. That worked really well until it didnt. It is not entirely clear. It is not clearly that you never work. It was only absurd not to be working and we need more rules. There were court decisions. We can elaborate later. The courts continue to throw out the fccs efforts to impose stronger rules. In 2010, the rules were promulgated. In january this year, the court threw out those rules as exceeding the fcc authority to regulate the internet. Where we are today, those rules have been thrown out of revenue chairman tom weller have been thrown out and we have a new chairman tom wheeler. But consistent with the limitations that the court imposed, they try to reimpose the rules. Chairman wheeler proposed something mpr, another set of rules. Those rules were meant immediately with a massive outcry, massive opposition, the likes that never been seen before. It is opposition from the left. Not the same kind opposition to regulation that we have seen before, it was opposition that you have not gone far enough. You have to do something far more substantial in this case. The argument was you have to impose these title ii common carrier regulators, true to the internet like it is a water utility, electric utility. Now, we are waiting to see what happens. Chairman wheeler proposed the second rules that do not go that far. He suggested he would be open to the possibility of title to regulation. And we had debate and the fccs record and hours of events like this and millions of words in publications like jacob, assessing the question of whether we should treat the internet like a common carrier or something less. Maybe it can segue for you. The issue underlying regulation of internet and in this fashion whether anything ranging from the Internet Freedom up to treatment like a common carrier are what we want to talk about rather than debating the merits or demerits of the rules. I think we can do that despite we are right now is really asking the question, whether it will be regulating the internet as title 2 or something less . Before we go back into that, i want to ask about the political stakes. Open internet versus close internet and the issue of Free Expression and political expression, the week before last i was in turkey. In turkey, which is a democracy, the president got a law passed saying he could take down anything from the internet at will and immediately began to do so. The political censorship of the internet is very clear. We are taught by different bandwidth speeds, isnt a rhetoric it rhetoric . [indiscernible] theres no question we are not in turkey. Now on . The turkey example. It is worth noting that when the protests broke out about a year ago over a government proposal that will does impart bulldozed impart to the wishes of the local community, the state media and private broadcast media in turkey not cover it at all. It was only because people in turkey have access to Services Like twitter that they were able to get the news out of what was going on with people protesting in the streets. The freedom to connect through relatively open Services Like twitter is really absolutely vital to any hope of an open society. We, here in the United States, it is worth going back to maybe 20 plus years ago he for we had the internet at all, before we had social networking, before we had email, we had mainstream media. It was a much more closed system. If you wanted to be heard by the larger society, you have to get through a gatekeeper. Persuade an editor that what you had to say was valuable and the gatekeepers was not a particularly diverse group. We had a much more constrained National Conversation as a result. As we have now is absolutely a much better situation of an open media system thanks to the open internet. That said, i think this argument about Net Neutrality is part of a larger argument of merits of open versus closed systems. I think i can illustrate with a recent example. There are services on the ellen internet that are more open and services a more closed and the philosophical issue if everybody has equal access and equal opportunity to reach everybody else with her message is playing out in realtime and many other ways. Not just a question of if the owners of the pipes have to not discriminate in the content they carry. You may remember about two months ago when it was in the middle of the summer and mike brown was murdered in ferguson and there were protests in the streets almost from the beginning. If you were on twitter and glancing at what was coming through your feed, you probably saw fairly quickly there were a lot of angry and upset people and people were sharing pictures of the police in their robocop uniforms and so on. If you were on facebook, you do not see this at all in your news feed for the first few days. You saw the als ice bucket challenge. The reason so many people saw the challenge opposed to the ferguson challenge is because facebook has a different algorithm of what they put on your news feed. Facebook put what they think you will want. Not upsetting their users they want to keep their users happy and in a mood to Pay Attention to advertisers. Twitter and its algorithm is much more direct because what you have chosen to follow. The Net Neutrality of the services we rely on is absolutely vital to whether or not we have an open and robust conversation or one that is in all kinds of ways shaped and throttle and limited by private interests. I am not sure i totally agree with you. I do want to go back to this question about the internet as public utility or not. He used the metaphor of sidewalk. Water, electricity, and if bandwidth is like electricity, you pay the more you use. In practice, isnt this mainly from the point of view of the carriers, commercial issue whether they can charge more to the people we use the most of it . No. I do not think that is the issue. That is how it is framed to suggest it is issue that the government should stay away from but it is much more, less than that. It can be expressed as simply payment. If it were that hides the complexity of the issue. My position on the advocacy side, i think in our era, it has become one of the essentials and should be regarded as a public utility. It was a different story 15 years ago when we were trying to do broadband rollout. It has come to the point where you go to a new apartment or this is and you want electricity, water, and broadband. What do one for the broadband carrier is to be reliable, as cheap as possible, and for the service to give you what you want and not impose its own strange little speedups or slowdowns or whatever else. But the carriers have long wanted and i can understand the economic reason is the ability to differentiate taxes on the internet. Those who have more to pay, they like to charge the more and create a fast lane and slow lane. There is some economic justifications are those type of deals. Public interest go against it. It comes to the idea there are some businesses which are in the nature of Public Infrastructure. If you imagine the brooklyn bridge, i could say the George Washington bridge, but more politically loaded. If they were to if