Park foundation dedicated to heightening Public Awareness of critical issues. The kohlberg foundation. Barbara g. Fleischman. And by our sole corporate sponsor, mutual of america designing customized individual and Group Retirement products. Thats why were your retirement company. Welcome. If i told you that sovereign powers were about to put a toll booth on the street that leads from your house to the nearest interstate, allowing your richest neighbors to buy their way to the open road while you were sent to the slow lane, you would no doubt be outraged. Well, prepare to scream bloody murder, because Something Like that could be happening to the internet. Yes, the internet. Your internet. Our internet. The electronic Public Square that ostensibly allows everyone an equal chance to be heard. This democratic highway to cyberspace has thrived on the idea of Net Neutrality that the internet should be available to all without preferential treatment. Without preferential treatment. But Net Neutrality is now at risk. And from its supposed guardian, the federal communications commission. The fcc chairman tom wheeler is circulating potential new rules that reportedly would allow Internet Service providers to charge higher fees for faster access. So the Big Companies like verizon and comcast could hustle more money from those who can afford to buy a place in the fast lane. Everyone else nonprofit groups, startups, the smaller, independent content creators, and everyday users move to the rear. The net, neutral no more. A final decision on the new rules isnt expected until later this year. Meanwhile, you have the chance to be heard during an official comment period. Well tell you more about that later in the broadcast, but first lets listen to two people who monitor this world and strive to explain it to the rest of us. Susan crawford is a visiting professor at harvard law school, a contributor to Bloomberg View and author of this essential book, captive audience the Telecom Industry and monopoly power in the new gilded age. David carr covers the busy intersection of media with business, government and culture, and he writes a popular weekly column, media equation for the new york times. Welcome to you both. So help us sort out why the average citizen out there should care about this issue. Right now, for most americans, they have no choice for all the information, data, entertainment coming through their house, other than their local cable monopoly. And here, we have a situation where that monopoly potentially can pick and choose winners and losers, decide what you see. How interesting, how interactive it is. How quickly it reaches you, and charge whatever it wants. So theyre subject to neither oversight, nor competition. So the average american should care because its a pocketbook issue. Its also an innovation issue. Whos going to get to decide what new things come into our houses . People have a close, intimate relationship with the web in a way they dont other technologies. Its where they see their loved ones. Its where they communicate with people. And they have the precious propriety feelings about it. And im not sure if the fcc really knows what theyre getting into. Youve been in touch with tom wheeler. Can you tell me what you think is driving him at the moment . He doesnt want to spark a war with the industry. He believes that he wont be able to get anything else done if he leans towards calling these guys a utility. What i think hes missing is that hes sparked a war with an entire american populous. We love internet access. We want it. It is very personal. And to give up on any constraint of these monopolists seems very odd to people. So theyre waking up. Theyre noticing this issue. I mean, people dont get excited about this until their movie starts stuttering or they cant upload big files. Then they get plenty, plenty excited. People expect it to be like electricity. You expect to turn on the cold water and to have it flow. You expect to plug something in and for it to light up. And you expect to turn on your internet, and for it to work. So if customers are willing, as you are, to pay for a Premium Service as they do with as we do with our mobile phone contracts or Business Class travel, then why not for the internet . This is much more like electricity. It should be available to all at a reasonable price because thats the substrate, thats the input into absolutely every element of american life, social, economic, cultural. This is just the highway for every kind of transaction we want to engage in. Then if its like electricity, why not treat it as a public utility, a common carriage, as we have telephones and electrical power for so long . Well, thats why my first question to tom wheeler would be, why are you giving up . We seem to have no oversight of this market at all. And yet, because of your short term political expediency needs, youre saying youre not even going to try to have firm legal ground on which to constrain the appetites of these companies to control information. Short term political expediency . What do you mean . The head of the cable association, michael powell, used to be the chairman of the fcc. He said it would be world war iii if the fcc even leaned towards calling these guys a utility. Thats what mr. Wheeler is facing. And the risk is that then those actors march on capitol hill, gut his budget, and dont allow him to do the other things he wants to accomplish with the commission. What hes, i think, failing to understand is that this is it. This is the legacy moment for tom wheeler. This is when he decides that he actually hes a regulator and hes going to take a firm hand when it comes to these enormously powerful companies. But is he a free agent . I mean, he was in the industry for several years before he came to the fcc. Michael powell was at the fcc before he took the job that tom wheeler once had. I mean, can they be honest brokers . Well, he was a cable lobbyist. But he can now rise to the mantle of public leadership and say, this is the important moment. This is it. The thing is, you cant suggest that what hes doing is unreasonable. But i worry that its going to end up were going to end up with these nodes of innovation. And that were going to ghettoize what was supposed to be a national resource. This was this whole infrastructure was built by the government. But if you allow all the head ends of it, all the sort of sweet spots of it to lie in private hands, then that whole sort of village common breaks down. And isnt doesnt reflect a democracy. I mean, it was president obama that talked about the democratic impulses of the web and how that needed to be preserved. I havent seen a lot of that in what hes done. And tom wheeler says that, look, the fccs tried twice to rewrite the rules of Net Neutrality. And the appeals court, federal appeals court, has turned thumbs down twice. Hes saying, im only doing what i can do to write rules that are consistent with what the court has said. Whats not right about that is that he can do something. The fcc has tried to simultaneously deregulate by not labeling these guys as utilities and yet, adopt Net Neutrality rules. All he has to do is relabel these services as Utility Services and then he stands on firm legal footing. He can forebear from any details of those rules. He doesnt want to apply. The courts have struck this down because its incoherent. Thats the problem. If he marches forward on a clear legal path, hell be fine. But he wants to avoid world war iii on the cable institutions. We frame this altogether in commercial terms. But isnt there a threat to the noncommercial sector, to the scientific sites, to the historical sites, to the cultural sites, to the sites that deal in Civic Engagement . They are acting from a different motive than the profit motive. Arent they at risk here . All those sites are like the people in fort lee, new jersey, trying to get across the George Washington bridge. There are traffic cones being set up on that bridge by a private actor whos under no constraint. You know, what theyre going to do, where theyre going to squeeze traffic, where theyre going to extract rents. But this is about the free flow of information and we should all be able to assume the presence of a nondiscriminatory, extraordinarily reliable network. I have to jump in on that. I think to analogize it to what Chris Christies aides did on the bridge is assigning motive and punishment in a way that is really not at work. These guys think theyre up to really good things. Theyre not setting out to punish anyone. They just think that the Public Interests and their interests are perfectly aligned. I dont agree. I dont care about their intentions. Weve got a problem when one gatekeeper can have so much control over everything flowing into american houses. Take what some of these providers say. They argue that without the power to provide the use of preferential services to the leading content providers, they wont get the revenue to invent in the future to indebt in the future, you say is still yet out there that we have not yet foreseen. Over the last several years, comcast has invested just 15 percent of its revenues in expanding its network. Its in harvesting mode. Its making 95 percent plus profits for its broadband product. It has no incentive to expand its network. So yes, theyll make that argument. But the facts are directly to the contrary. You know, the cable industry has worked hard to see that homegrown civic initiatives toward broadband have been more or less outlawed in 19 states. Id really like to see, in this process, some pushback on that. If youre going to make way for comcast to own this big a footprint, at least give americans, american cities, american institutions the opportunity to grow an alternative. And we should see a roll back in terms of preventing cities from building up their own fiber network. This industry, at t, verizon, comcast and time warner made 1. 4 trillion over the last five years. They have no interest in seeing competition emerge in these cities and david is right. In 19 states its either difficult or impossible for cities to do this for themselves and mayors know that they need these networks in order to attract businesses, keep social life coherent in their cities, and build up their fabric of their civic life. And so theres a lot of interest across the country in using the assets that cities have. I used to be a comcast customer. Now im a verizon fios customer. I have fiber optic at my house. I live in new jersey. It costs money but its highly functional. It works when i want it to. It does what i want it to do. Why arent they everywhere . I know its a capital intensive business, because you have to put stuff underground, over ground, that last mile to the home, very expensive. But as susan pointed out, theres a lot of gold in that, trillions of dollars. So if you sink the money into investment, you can pull a lot of money out of that business. So why hasnt that happened . You keep returning to the subject of the merger between comcast and time warner. Whats the relationship of that merger to Net Neutrality . Well, its sort of where the internet lives. When we talk about the web were not talking about something that the government built back in the 60s so big institutions could talk to each other. Were talking about a hybrid system of private and public right of ways and infrastructure that has grown up over time in an ad hoc way that commissioner wheeler and others who are struggling to define and regulate. Its a very complicated sort of hybrid organism. I think we can make it a little simpler. So youve got one wire coming from one Company Coming into everybodys house. Theres a box at the end of that wire. We call it today a settop box. But its also going to become a web browser. There is a Software Platform on that box. Comcast controls that browser. That browser that youre using to access everything can pick stream picks, Comcast Service over netflix, can pick comcast Telemedicine Service over whatever you might want to sign up for. Can pick comcast Educational Software over what you might want to have. Thats a very different picture from the permissionfree internet that weve all grown up with. If you think of all the big business wins right now, whether its airbnb or uber, what theyre doing is theyre taking available assets that are already out there, and theyre helping you navigate them. Theres a lot of money in that and as susan points out, if you control navigation, if you are able to point people in certain ways and send them down paths where you can monetize them, it probably follows that youre going to sort of favor what you do. Theyre in the content business. They own nbc. They own universal studios. Comcast has an incentive to put up one gateway into its network and then charge for getting in. It did that with netflix very recently. And if it can do that with the biggest, most popular overthetop company, it can do it with anybody. To me to say to people, im in favor of Net Neutrality, but if you got enough dough, you can bolt it in a special way, i would say that sounds like two internets, a good internet and a bad internet. And i dont like the idea that somebody can control traffic. To control traffic is to control information and also to control a kind of message. Message . The content . Yes. If my message comes to you slowly and her message comes to you quickly, shes going to win. Did i hear you mutter a moment ago that this potential merger between comcast and time warner is frightening . Whats interesting, the consigliore of comcast, whose name is david cohen, hes been described this way in newspapers has said now this may sound scary. He says that because the American Public is worried about this. It really sounds like shamu and godzilla merging. Theyre enormous companies and they just cover everything with bundles of services and americans have no choice. The United States stands alone in its dedication to private Companies Running all of its Utility Services, with some public oversight. Thats always been our history. Other countries started with Public Companies and have this idea of a public trust for communications. That it because of all the social spillovers it needs to be made available to everyone at a reasonable price. We have now got the worst of this bargain. We both have private companies. Were dedicated to that and no oversight of them. And thats leading to an extraordinarily weak situation. So the answer is not to give up on public oversight, but to make it better. To unleash the regulatory ideal, which is for proinnovation, proamerican people. Weve just fallen down on the job. I dont think its as simple as susan makes it. I watch the Supreme Court grappling with aereo. What is an aereo . And here are people who grew up watching mash get pulled in over rabbit ears, trying to deal with an antenna farm that remotely records programming in the cloud that consumers then can access and pull down and you could just see them struggling and grappling. I dont think congress is all that much different. I think we have a cohort of mostly Older Americans that is struggling to put get its arms around the future. And theyre doing so in sort of confused and inconsistent ways. And i do think Companies Like comcast or google or whoever, that have a firmer grasp on what the what the future looks like, theyre playing a game over the game that washington doesnt necessarily understand. What can we learn from past regulatory battles like this . Well, we went through this with electricity and with oil and with railroads. These are Infrastructure Services that, given half a chance, a private company will try to corner. We need to have government intervention. Were always in this tug of war between rules and an outright, unconstrained private market. Where you have something that is essential for every part of american society, government intervenes to try to make sure that its available at a reasonable price. We havent done that. I do think that the rail analogy is useful because, unlike countries all over the world, weve allowed our rail network to kind of weve expected it to thrive on its own. And so, i get on the acela and i think to myself, im riding a bullet train that doesnt go fast. Why is that . And its because its going through tunnels that were built during the civil war. And in the same way, broadband, true connectivity, true high Speed Internet there are so many countries that are better at this than we are. How is it that we invented the internet, we have built companies that have pulled billions and billions of dollars out of it but somehow, were losing custody of its Better Properties to other countries . That just seems wrong. The fcc is voting on may 15th to move forward with the proposal or not. Thats less than two weeks away. What do you think people can do to be heard at that may 15th meeting . The uproar in the country is already causing the fcc to walk back from wheelers initial statement that he was never going to move towards treating these guys like a utility. Thats already happening. Keeping that pressure up is only going to help because then they have to keep all these options on the table and act like a regulator. So writing into the fcc, writing to your congressman, keeping in touch with your senator. That really is making a difference. The white house is responding. I do think that consumers have to think back to sopa and sopa. Stop online piracy. That the Entertainment Industry wanted to make fundamental changes in the way the web is regulated. And they thought it was no big deal. People went ballistic. And with the support