christopher yoo who runs the center for technology innovation and competition there. professor yoo, what is that? >> guest: it is research and education -- it's part of the law school. we do research, we hold events, and we're sponsoring a bunch of joint degree programs to train a new type of professional with advanced training, engineering and economics training. >> host: and where does the technology and innovation come in? >> guest: it comes -- >> host: when it comes to telecommunications policy. >> guest: it's, if you look at the way we use devices and the way we think of the internet, even back in '95 it was dial-up, and we've been in ar world where we're saying cable versus dsl. wireless is projected to go through the roof in six months flat. we now have not just a cell phone or a data phone, but typically a tablet, a cell phone that migrates onto a wi-fi network, laptops that are hooked

on, multiple connections often in two hands at the same time. understanding technologically what that means is a big challenge because wireless just operates on different principles, and in many ways most people don't realize unless you have an lte phone, it actually isn't an internet-enabled device. somewhere back in the network is the real device to the gateway. so that fact alone is a technical fact that is lost on a lot of policymakers and is uncontroversial from an engineering standpoint. part of what we're trying to do is to bring the conversation, raise the level of the debate to get the basics down and work on the real issue. >> host: well, taking your example there, what's the legal arguments or the legal information that people should have about that? >> guest: about wireless in particular? >> host: about the example you just used. >> guest: the example i just gave is when people say one easy one that wireless should be

exactly the same as fixed line, you have to understand you can't actually do that with a third generation wireless device. pause what you're say -- because what you're saying is the desktop computer is in communication with the web site, those are the ones connecting it, and you can talk about leaving it in the end control, no change, works on internet principles. if you're on a third generation phone, your device is not physically capable of operating in the same way as the computer on your desk. in fact, it depends on an old legacy phone technology regulated under a different regime with a different set of rules that naturally apply, so lumping them together is putting apples and oranges together and expecting them to taste the same. >> host: joining our conversation is gautham nagesh of the "wall street journal." >> hi, peter. professor, the fcc is currently embroiled in a rulemaking which touches on zell of the issues -- several of the issues that you've mentioned in that regard. now, the initial proposed rules

have drawn heat and debate from both sides, especially over the concept of net neutrality. could you tell us, please, what does net neutrality mean to you, and do you think that net neutrality has existed on the internet at any point in its existence? >> guest: network neutrality is one of, is one of these issues that almost defies definition. i keep thinking of monet's multiple views of the cathedral, everyone's got a different view. for some people the original proposal included devices, and when i said that, they said, oh, you should be able to hang any phone you want. and for some people it was. for some people it's about the way networks interconnect together, how networks hang within a network. to me, the simplest way i would think about it is people who support network neutrality generally are opposed to one content provider or having a network favor one application over another. so if you wanted to favor video

or favor voice over all other applications or if you want to favor a particular video or voice provider over others -- >> and do you think that the network has been neutral in the past? >> guest: so this is a good example where i think a little technical information would be helpful. the answer's absolutely not. people who oppose prioritization should take a look at the internet header, the ipb foreheader which is the guts, the magic that makes the internet work. there's something in there called the type of service flags. that's different services classes for high bandwidth, low latency, that was designed in the internet from the beginning. and people said, oh, that's just an old artifact. well, when we redesigned the internet because we were running out of internet addresses, they not only kept that field, they actually included another field called label field to do another form of prioritization quality

service. so if you look at the engineering design to suggest that this was never intended -- prioritization was never intended to be loud, i think a little engineering knowledge goes a long way. it's a design feature of the network from the beginning, and people are using it today to deliver, for example, voice services. we've all called on skype and been frustrated. the true, completely ip-based voice service to your zone is called voiceover lte. all use prioritization. the only way to make the call quality work, and a lot of video and other things work the same way. >> host: what do you think of the term "net neutrality"? >> guest: i've never been a fan. it's funny, there's an old debate in law about what does neutrality mean. neutral with respect to what? you can't be neutral with respect to everything. everything's different. so you're picking and choosing different aspects and, in fact, the choices of what you think are important, that's the real

work in terms of the world. the other thing i don't like about it is the phrase i threw in opposition was what i call netted questionersty. what you see -- net diversity. what you see in cell phones is nothing short of amazing. i was at a u.n.-sponsored organization, one of two that has any jurisdiction cans here, one of the things we were talking about was zero ratings programs. facebook has facebook zero where they give you a phone, fairly basic phone, and it has facebook as the home page. and if you use facebook, that data -- the usage doesn't count against your data cap for the month. and there's twitter zero and wikipedia zero, google-free zone, a lot of products like this. and it's an interesting thing where people would say there's a number of people who believe these are network neutrality violations. why? it's giving privileged position to one app both in terms of its visibility on the phone, but also it's not costing as much as the others. and there's been a lot of

objections to that. what i find is you, first, you go to the people from india, china, africa, they say this is how we're going to get the next four billion connected. it makes service cheaper, it allows people to buy lower data plans, cheaper data plans that don't cost as much, and they are very much committed to it. we all use the network the same way. my sons use social media, that seems to be all that they do. i'm in e-mail, i use mapping functions, things they don't use. and to me, there's a vision in this debate where it's a one size fits all where every device has to be everything to everybody, it's what i used to call the myth of the one screen. and what we're discovering is i think you're narrowing consumer choice by not letting providers come up with new solutions and new approaches, and maybe there are people who really do want -- well, there are people who want a great camera, they're willing to pay extra for it. and maybe we optimize the phone so it's a much better phone.

other people want realtime gaming, you know, the world of warcraft-obsessed kids in this world. and those are ways we can actually think more broadly, moving away from an idea of neutrality where all applications have to pay the same price and operate in the same way when, simply put, they need different things. financial services. we often think about this debate in terms of video, but to me, financial services is a great example. doesn't need a lot of bandwidth. what does it need? microsecond latencies, perfect record, ex post audit about. what's habit is they can't get that from the internet, they've exited. they have to implement through private networks. that bandwidth is not available. the genius of the internet is i'm not in philadelphia right now, i'm not on my computer. i'm not using that bandwidth. it's sharing of the band width. when you force someone to exit the network because they can't get what they want from it, you're actually killing the

genius that makes the sharing of bandwidth that makes the internet so efficient. >> host: want to read you a quote by reed hastings and get your reaction. we shouldn't have to pay for your network if you don't pay for your content. >> guest: reed hastings, the point -- it's an interesting problem. so what i would, the way i would analyze the issue is much simpler. one way or the other, the consumer's going to pay for all the content and the services getting netflix delivered to them. the consumers are the source of the value here. what we're basically fighting over is how that payment's going to be structured. is it just one payment to your cable or telephone provider and that's it and they don't get any money from netflix, or is it partially -- you also pay netflix, a subscription fee, and the question is how do do you structure those two numbers? if you have a world in which netflix pays nothing to comcast

and netflix is one-third of internet and still growing, comcast is going to have to expand its capacity. there's just no -- well, and they're going to have to do that regardless of netflix, that's just the world we're in. in a world where there's nothing else going on, they're going to have to charge every one of their users more for their higher capacity because it's going to cost real costs, and that's going to be whether those are netflix users or not. there's going to be a bunch of people who aren't netflix users who are going to pay for expanding capacity which is primarily video today. another way to structure it is saying, well, netflix is benefiting some from this expanded capacity. we need more bandwidth from the comcasts, verizons, at&ts of the world. both parties are going to benefit from it, and the way you determine between netflix and

comcast, they're actually sharing the cost. >> the fear of having the isp serve as a sort of check on potential business plans that in order to gape any leverage -- gain any leverage, the question is whether or not you can yet an isp -- get an isp for your service. does a wikipedia prevent the emergence of a competitor to one of those services down the road, in your view? >> guest: i think it enhances their ability. you have a different set of partnerships, expertise, some deal with financing, stability, guaranteed attractiveness of the customer. that sort of competition, to me, is much more open and much freer because what it means is we're thinking of new -- one of our problems is the digital divide. and there's a fascinating study

conducted by two sfcc staffers and a kentucky-based isp building out unserved people. go-thirds of people who don't use broadband right now would not take it even if it were free. they just don't see the value. and so part of what we see happening in some of these spaces is by saying i don't see the value. take this phone with facebook, and you can talk with your grandkids, and it won't cost -- it'll be less, it'll be free, or it won't cost you on the margin anything more. that they understand. and what we're starting to see is one of the things we're trying to do is crack the nut of the people who haven't adopted and solved the digital divide problems we have and the ability to partner with people like facebook p like wikipedia, like twitter have been proven very, very helpful. actually, the best example in the u.s. is what they call, is t-mobile's music freedom plan where you can stream music, and it doesn't count against your

balance cap. incredibly popular with consumers, and it's a way that t-mobile, the number four provider relatively weak position, is trying to change the way it does business a little bit to attract new customers at a time where they've actually had a lot of trouble doing that. to me, that's the genius of what makes the internet space so great, is we have all these people trying a bunch of things which we've never thought of before. >> but does can offering lower income consumers a portion of the internet increase the odds of them adopting the full internet or condition them to accept a restricted set of services as online connectivity? >> guest: we don't have great data on this. both scenarios, i suppose, are plausible. other people would say, you know, having a limited connection is better than no connection at all. the question is, as opposed to what? there's a bunch of countries where these plans have been deployed to see what their patterns are. what strikes me is, you know, i don't -- we all don't use the

entire internet. if you look at any usage, i go to maybe a dozen places regularly. you know, my e-mail service, i dial into my office, my bank, a few credit cards, a few news blog, a handful of things. would i willingly pay more for a better connection to my office even if that meant that it was, essentially, disadvantaging the others for whom -- absolutely. because that reflects how i use the internet. and so the idea of people getting stuck on something is a strange cop sent to me because -- consent to me because 48% of phones in the u.s. last year were feature phones, not smartphones. feature phones don't do very much. they're very locked down. they have strict control over apps by approval process. what they do is they do a handful of things very well like old metropcs. youtube very well, worked for the partner to make it happen and they were cheap. and for some people that is the right combination of price and value because they get something

that delivers on a good cost basis the kinds of things they need the most. and in many ways your question may even be wrong in the seasons that the premise i would fight a little bit because some consumers what they really want is youtube, maybe we ought to find a cheap phone that delivers them exactly what they want, and in a world when we're trading out a phone average of 18 months, the way you have a different evolution, and you'll get a new plan, actually, i personally think the chance of getting stuck is very, very low. >> host: professor yoo, are people giving up privacy with these partnerships? >> guest: so privacy, the answer is, yes, and it shouldn't surprise them. we talk about free apps and whether it's search where you can get google and bing and all the other search engines for free, we have, you know, e-mail through any one of a number of providers for free, document, you know, word processing, all the office suite. they're not free. they're advertising support.

and the research shows that if they actually look at your private information and target ads based on that, they generate something on the order of twice as much revenue than if they didn't. and in many ways some people look at europe and see their lack of an app environment, they have very restrictive privacy policies and advertisement-based services don't generate as much revenue, and they don't have as good apps. i tell my students if you're getting a software that has value for free, you are not the consumer, you are the product. you are being resold to somebody else. and the point is if you don't want to give up your privacy, you should expect to pay for value. if someone's giving you something you used to pay for in the old online world like a word processing package or an e-mail package for free, you should be fully aware that they are making money off of you through doing, and i guarantee they're doing it by looking at your private

information. the good news is we have solutions to that, and there are a bunch of concern there are cloud providers and other places that do completely private actions, and then they leave it up to us, the consumers, to decide where we want to go. and i think that makes a pretty good world. >> host: gautham nagesh. >> do you think consumers are aware that they are having their information trafficked or sold to the extent to which you saipped, and the other -- you said, and the other aspect of the internet, most people agree that the nature of the internet is that it is not very secure right now, and we see a lot of these very large attacks where millions of people's private information is disseminated. it seems like this is a trend that will continue. how do you think those two dynamics will play out, and is there a possibility people will lose trust in this ecosystem of free software? >> guest: i would say, yes, there is the potential that people will use trust. it was a daughter that program are -- darpa program where you couldn't get on unless the department of defense said you

could. it wasn't designed for that. so that's a good example to me about how the network is evolving, where some people actually want a lot of security in the network. if you're doing, you know, cloud-based stuff. used to be your keyboard to your cpu and your hardiesing all in your office is now zinging through the network, and as we know, cloud stuff isn't that secure as we find out from the icloud break-ins and all these problems. now all of a sudden maybe not for everything, but for certain things i might want some security. probables with security, if you've ever used these encryption things, it slows everything down. everything has to be processed, you have to put in keys, and even if it's transparent to you, it makes the system cumbersome. hey, maybe for my youtube videos i don't need encryption, but for e-commerce transactions, these things i do, then we're starting to see a very different world where we'll see some spread out in terms of what we want out of the network and out of security. this is one of the great

mysteries. you did mention something which is very funny which i think is misunderstood. we have this rash of news whether it's the home depot or target or -- kmart, i say any one of a number of retailers that are losing information. i've started to look into this a little bit. a lot of times the problem is not sort of the internet, it's the scanners in the store which is using 20-30-year-old old technology which is extremely expensive to update which is the weak link. and that's not just a network problem, there's a hardware problem at the retail level which could be solved in a different way. but this is where you have to look into the technical details and understand the real vulnerabilityings. >> host: so, professor yoo, are we putting band-aids on a system that wasn't meant to be secure in the first place? >> guest: to some extent, yes. and i was part of a project where they were trying to rethink what would happen if we redesigned it from scratch? if you look at the engineering literature, there's a bunch of things the internet doesn't do well, security is one of them.

mobility is another one. it was not really designed to do this. as of right now, if you were to call my cell phone right now, you would not go -- the signal would not even travel the distance between us or to the cell tower or back, it was go to philadelphia and back because otherwise every time i move, they would have to update millions of records to say is, oh, he's not in philadelphia anymore, he's now in washington d.c. so we've got band-aids. other people said wished do this more directly -- we should do this more directly. the fact is my computer typically has three connections to the internet. i can be on my physical connection, i'll have a wi-fi connection, a usb port plugged in and, in fact, forest different routes -- there's different routes into my computer at any time. we've started to think about how we should rethink all this. other people would say this basic architecture that's 40 years old has done great. if it ain't broke, don't fix it. and all these fancy things that engineers want to do with it,

there is a good case to say, yes, maybe we are putting band-aids, but the band-aids are working. there's an article by mark hanley called the internet only just works. basically, yes, it's an our liner flying and we're remaking it, reinventing it, but somehow we get the duct tape and the bailing wire in the right place every single time, and maybe that's the new normal is sort of what he's saying. and that's a good argument too. that's something we need to and make decisions about. >> host: could you foresee an internet architecture 2.0? >> guest: we're actually seeing it now in many ways. it's funny, i hear a lot of talk about we can't fragment the internet. there's more than one now. as i said with financial services, there's private networking that exists aside from the internet where if it really needs to be secure, you're not going to put it on the public internet. so what we see right now is thousands of networks now, and some of them are using principles that are inconsistent

with the internet. why? because for the needs of that application, you have to. i'll give you a good example. there's a wonderful organization called internet two, a collection of mostly universities but people want to do research on the internet two. they used to say, oh, don't prioritize, we tried it, it doesn't work. they now have a circuit-switched networking. instead of being internet-like, you dedicate them old telephone style for large data applications. you know, if you were doing a remote, if we were in a virtual reality world where you were in washington and i was in philadelphia and we were using the data to duplicate this whole environment, there'd be tons of data moving back and forth, and with enough bandwidth, we can do it. that's what that's for. that approach violates half a dozen basic internet principles, and if you were a network purist, you'd say it's an anathema, it's a blight on the beautiful, interactive, purely

interoperable world that's the internet. but for that application, that's the only way it's going the work. that's why i say network diversity. we have to think broadly about it and not be too hypnotized by the use case of today which is video. it wasn't the use case of fife years ago -- five years ago, and if i knew what the use case of five years from you would be, i'd be making a lot of money and enjoying life on the beach. none of us are that smart. >> so coming back to sort of where we started, the internet, as you articulated, has come to mean so many things to so many people which is why, i think, this debate at the fcc has stirred up such a public reaction. is it fair to say, first, that this debate as the rules currently are crafted seem to be mostly affecting people who already subscribe to home broadband service, and they seem to be reluctant for that to change in any way? i think you spoke to some of the demographics of that. and then the second thing is

what do you think of the proposal, as chairman tom wheeler issued it in april? >> guest: so i do think that the network neutrality debate is mostly about the quality of connection, but it presume is more people who -- presumes for people who already have connections. there's a separate question of, you know, maybe what we should be thinking about is how to stimulate investments in the networks and how to make that cheaper in order to connect those people. second, demographically what's fascinating is if you look back at the old proceedings from the 2010 order, huge number of state and local politicians voted. almost overwhelmingly democratic. so this wasn't a partisan issue. they said, don't do it. 70 house democrats, so basically a third of the majority caucus wrote many and said -- >> do you mean reclassification? >> guest: don't do even the 2010 order. why? because if you can't manage networks, the only way you can maintain the throughput is by building more capacity. building core capacity makes networking more expensive.

making it more expensive makes it harder to reach rural areas. they tended to all be rural politicians who did not want to make networking more expensive. so that's the flipside of what you're talking about, hard to reach populations. minority populations tend to rely on wireless devices, higher than national averages on social media. they have a very particular set of profiles. and, you know, senior citizens have a different set of barriers. so i expect we should customize products to reach them because just handing them here's the new iphone 6, that's not going to do it. i've got parents in their late 70s. i'll guarantee you, that's not going to do it. i actually like tom wheeler's original proposal which was based on commercial reasonableness, people often will criticize that. i actually am doing some work now, that term is as a legal standard is used throughout the law in lots and lots of contracts in ways that are helpful. if it's within industry practices, it's reasonable. if it's not, we figure out how

far if you're trying something new -- and we want you to be able to try something new. that's a good way to kill innovation. the thing i like about the proposal is, one, it's likely to withstand legal review. the fcc has lost in court twice, and they don't want to go down that road a third time, so they're very much bracketed in. and i think they're also worried if they lose this one, it'll kick over to the next administration. they've got to do something that will survive judicial review this time. and it's a way to get past the world we're in and to really letting people to innovate and then evaluate on a case-by-case basis each of the new in innovations and see, has it harmed people? what some people want to do is to apply the old regime of telephone regulation to the internet which says the default answer is no unless you come to the fcc and get permission. and that's a what we talk about

title ii and forbearance, is that they have the regime that applies to everybody, and then you get permission to deviate from it. well, there's two things. if they're worried about prioritization, even proponents will say title ii and traditional telephone regulation never prevented you from having different classes of service. and, in fact, mark cooper of the consumer federation of america who's a strong supporter, he looked at it, you have nine different classes of service minimum under that title ii world. it's not even going to get the world you want to be in, but worse yet, if you are subject to a rule until you get the fcc, an order saying we forbear from this, minimum six months just from the procedural requirements as well because you have to notice it up and the reply comments and all this, the sunset agreement. and that's under the best case scenario. as we all know, this could take a year, couple years, or it could never get done. i organized an event two weeks ago where jeff pulver who invented the first -- he

invented vonage. he became the father of vonage and what we did. he just said this wonderful thing, i'm a dreamer. and to him, voip was ham radio talking to people all over the world in the internet age. if you make me come to a washington agency and get permission before i do it, i'll still dream, i'll just do it somewhere else. that's the change -- the thing i like about the wheeler proposal and i worry about some of the proposals in this space, is i want to preserve that flexibility for people who come up with strange ideas, have the latitude to try them. >> host: professor christopher yoo of the university of pennsylvania, please come back. >> guest: thank you. >> host: gautham nagesh, thank you. >> thank you. >> c-span, created by america's cable companies 35 years ago and brought to you as a public service by your local cable or satellite provider. >> health andum