inevitable and that beneficial. with people adding their own content and that increases the need for adde@@@@@@@ a g@ @ @ @ i am a professor at the

university of nebraska. my point of view is slightly different. yesterday, a friend of mine said that you have to check out this clip on youtube. it is called "star face --, scar face cool play." if you have seen this movie, it is very violent. some school is putting on this play of "scar face."

there is a line or the nine year-old says "you fudge me, you fudge with the best." i wish there was a word that was a combination of disturbing and awesome. i am glad that the clip was able to be shown. i was pleased that the internet could communicate what ever they want. i don't think that the cable companies should be the intermediary. freedom of speech is an exception in our constitutional

ansystem. them we want to be able to debate different -- we want to be able to debate a different political issues openly. all across the world, we believed freedom of speech it is important for democracy and structural regulation of media is important. after world war ii, the u.s. government helped to shape the german broadcast networks. i have met with arab regulators for the first time and i asked them about what kind of system they should have. we have had friends that have written the plans for iraq post war.

secretary clinton has announced the secretary clinton doctrine is that we support an open internet around the world. this is to promote democracy and their own security. the question of what system we have in our country is a question of what kind of democracy do we want. freedom of speech is an exception. we want to make sure that a majority cannot determine questions of speech. the first amendment takes this in hand and uses it to strike down majority decisions. there are not laws that all of us would agree on. some of the indecency cases, i

have written against the fairness doctrine. we can have a structural rules. the reverse sources of speakers. ownership limits. newspapers can't own broadcast stations in the same time. also access to other people's infrastructure. think about a common carrier rules. you can pick up the phone and call whoever you want and say whatever you want. the phone company cannot block or silence certain types of speech. network neutrality is an issue that has come up often, that to be a rule that would provide all

consumers access to an open internet without the phone or cable company intermediating the experience. that is where our biggest disagreement is. i tend to think that the government should have some discretion to impose these kind of rules -- ownership limits, access rules. we see this in broadcast but also in satellite, cable. we have seen them imposed across the board in phone regulations. you can see it on wireless phone service, wireless internet rules. you see it across many different regulations that impose different kinds of rules. i think that a lot of them are not required.

if it is imposed by government, if i have gone to the system ended the rule has been imposed, i think that courts do not stand in the way. i say that as a former advocate for consumer groups. i would like to make one point about all of this which we agreed on which is that most of you at some point or another have agreed to some conditions. turner's case was a case of holding cable companies to carry broadcast stations. of course, broadcast asians do

not want to be subject to their own access rules. they needed to make sure that broadcast rules were imposed on cable companies. i have seen a lot as editorials in favor of network neutrality. they are moving from print to the internet. they would like to do this without getting permission from every carrier in the country. i am assuming that these newspapers will be very happy to argue that access to the cable infrastructure for net neutrality makes for more freedom rather than for more regulation. there are millions to agree with me out there.

i want to make one other point about first amendment judicial activism, striking down rules that are access rules. i will give the example of the internet. the federal communications commission issued a report. this was full of stuff that would regulate the cable carriers, broadcast, etc. the net neutrality rule is a role that would say that cable or phone companies cannot speed up or slow down their traffic. the internet is not a speech idiom, is also close to our economic activities. i purchase my books on amazon, i bank online. if we have judges who are

imposing a needed experience over the will of congress and the fcc, that is economic regulation coming straight from the court and this is something that we abandoned back in 1937. to the extent that the internet is a based infrastructure for economic and all of our speech, it would be dangerous for the court to strike down rules that have been adopted after years of study and debate on the issue. >> let me throw a couple of questions. and this relates to the comment about the value of the spectrum.

for get the scarcity issue, the value of the spectrum now occupied by television broadcasters and it has an estimated to be as much as a million dollars. just except that it is possible. the fcc has actually used this figure. a trillion dollars is a lot of value. shouldn't they be getting something for that value? what about a vat? forget about the scarcity. you hav>> this goes to my pointt what are the ties.

there are regulations that they would not otherwise permit if there was some benefit. there is no end to that question because you can look for some kind of benefit. newspaper trucks it roll down public rights of way. cable companies use public rights of way to extend their lines. as long as you can argue that there's some connection to a public benefit, that can then become the justification for regulating in and other way. there is no end to how far you go for what the price is. you can say that you accept this and i can impose the new regulation. >> let me change it somewhat. suppose we decided this is a game we cannot play with the

broadcasters so let's just take it away from them. let's just have cable. is that ok? one of these cases is allowing broadcasters to cash in their spectrum. >> if you are talking about a purely voluntary arrangement, that would be one thing. you are talking about the government forcing people off of the spectrum they are using because they prefer to use it for another purpose, you run up against some legal problems. there have been proposals that the fcc should affirmatively use regulation to drive broadcasters off of the spectrum.

i don't know if that is a serious proposal or a rhetorical question. >> from a policy standpoint, now that we can use the internet protocol platform, there is no policy justification to have that much spectrum dedicated to one format. this is not about policy but politics. you have people who can have that spectrum for a long time. the problem is getting them off. but bad the. -- you can have the radio when you want it, any thing when you want

it. the days of having this just video do not make any sense. >> a lot of these debates should remain policy and political debates@@@@@@@ @ @ @ ) suggesting that there would not

be any kind of constraint on net neutrality rules? they cannot sell to content providers of expedited services. one-size-fits-all. you can charge a subscriber for different types of services but you cannot have a two-sided market. >> the question is does this violate the freedom of speech. at first blush, it looks like an economic regulation. it does not strike me as much different than the rules we have already had on phone companies. >> gets to the regulatory

classification issues. you would not want a phone company to intervene in a conversation with your grandmother. this goes back to the way in which they were divided and they provided one civil service and nothing else. at that point, the service was different than now where they are providing a range of services on different media. no one would subscribe to a phone company if they could break on to your line whenever they wanted to. >> architecture e facts content. -- effects content.

m d protocol will do one thing well and other things not so well. the internet is a person to person set up for a file transfer, it is bad at multitasking. the internet is a shared medium. what i get depends on what you are doing. the amtrak is offering wireless service on the fastest train. there is something in the packet that says don't download video. if you do this, you will take up the band with. would lead to interact with each other. they're doing this because this is a shared medium and today are trying to meter this on the basis of applications. there is a contrast between fios

and uverse. we have leverage the existing wires. now we are getting new wires. the price tag for putting in the fiber was $24 billion. at&t is doing it for $7 billion. they are doing this by leveraging the and the sistine infrastructure. -- leveraging the existing infrastructure. they have to deal from one source, themselves. limiting people's ability to manage the network forces them to do capital expenses and will raise the cost of the destination.

>> we are about out of time but are there any urgent questions? >> i think that chris i's first two points are excellent. . .

they had in mind the public interest. an auction of diamonds does not apply to an auction of cars or real estate. i think your point is sometimes lost in this debate, and it is part of the overall ecosystem. >> this is a tricky figure. the economic study that everyone is relying on is based upon the 700 mhz doctrine. the conclusion was that the direct transfer value would be about $50 billion, but there is a consumers are + -- surplus using this 300 mhz spectrum. >> chris made some good examples

that regulation affects this. i am not sure which way that cuts. c-span.org [unintelligible] we have tons of rules that affect this and violate the purposes and the doctrine. there's a question which way it cuts. and a quick thought on what ryan said, it is tricky to figure out what we do with the first amendment as transition toward the system where you figure out the different services over the same kind of platform. and there have been for policy -- there have been policy proposals like a horizontal regulation or you regulate the infrastructure companies and the logical layer software

companies. soap comcast -- comcast would have different kinds of protection. i think that is where i would tend to reside. >> there are two sets of interest here that have to be balanced. part of the debate is that the all a provider, and people care about intermediation that matters. that means you have to balance the ticket to appear there is also a different kind of content provider with the free-speech interests. the people who will get architecture at of the network. right now we're demanding more and more from them. we should expect to see the network evolve and offer more and more things. that may have been the standard before, but their content

providers that want to speak in a different way and they cannot find it from the status quo. >> i will give you the last word. i think we are indulging their patients. let's get a hand for the panelists. [applause] [captioning performed by national captioning institute] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2010]