from time to time on "the communicators" we like to step back from the day-to-day issues and talk to the big thinkers on telecommunications policy. joining us this week is university of pennsylvania professor christopher yoo, who runs the center for technology, innovation and competition there. professor yoo, what is that? >> it is part of the law school. we do research and hold events. we are sponsoring innovative programs to sponsor a new type of professional. >> and where does the technology and innovation coming? >> it comes to telecommunications policy. when you look at the way we use devices and the internet, even back in 1995, it was [indiscernible] projections,t the

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. we have multiple connections going at the same time, often in two hands at the same time. it is a radically different world. understanding technologically what that means is a big challenge. wireless operates on different principles. most people don't even realize unless you have an lte phone, it's not an internet-enabled device. it can use a legacy telephone connection to get back to the cell tower. that fact alone is something that is a technical fact that is lost on a lot of policy makers and is uncontroversial from an engineering standpoint. part of what we're trying to do is to raise the level of debate to get the basics down and work on the real issues. >> taking your example there, what is the legal argument, the legal information people should

have about that? example i just gave is thatwhen people say wireless should be the same as fixed line, you have to understand, you can't actually do that with a third-generation wireless device. what they are saying is the desktop communicator is in communication with the website. you can talk about leaving it in the end user's control, no change. if you own a third-generation phone, your device is not physically capable of operating in the same way as a computer on your desk. depends on an old legacy phone technology regulated under a different regime with a different set of rules that actually applies. lumping them together is putting apples and oranges together. this is not going to work. >> joining our conversation, "wall street journal." inthe fcc is embroiled

rulemaking that touches on several of the issues you have mentioned in that regard. how broadband providers treat content over their network. the initial proposed rules have drawn a lot of heat and debate from both sides, especially over the concept of net neutrality. what does net neutrality means to you, and do you think that net neutrality has existed on the internet at any point in its existence? >> net neutrality is one of these issues that almost defies definition. everyone has got a different view. for some people, the proposal included devices. you should be able to hang any phone you want. for some people, it was. for some people it is about how networks hang within the network. to me, the simplest way i think about it is people who support

net neutrality generally are opposed to favoring one content provider over another or having a network favor one application over another. you want to favor video or voice over all their applications or if you want to favor a video provider or voice provider over others, they would think that is a problem. networku think that the has been neutral in the past? >> this is an example where technical information would be helpful. the answer is absolutely not. people who oppose privatization should take a look at the internet header. that is the magic that makes the internet work. there is something in there called the type of service flag. forerent service classes high-bandwidth services, low latency services. people say, that's just an old artifact.

we were running out of internet addresses. they actually included another ofld to do another form prioritize nation for them. if you actually look at the engineering design to suggest that this was never intended to be -- privatization was never intended to be allowed, a think a little engineering knowledge goes a long way. it is a design feature of the network from the beginning and if you talk to the way people are using the network come a they're using it today to deliver voices. completely ip-based voice service to your phone is called [indiscernible] all use prioritization. [inaudible] >> what do you think of the term net neutrality? >> i have never been a fan. debate in lawd about what neutrality means. mutual respect to what?

-- neutral in respect to what? you're picking and choosing certain aspects. the choices of what you think are important, that is investing the real work in terms of the world. the other thing i don't like about it is the phrase i threw in a position was in that diversity. was internetion diversity. one of the things everyone was talking about are what are called zero rating programs. facebook has a product called facebook zero. they give you a basic phone and it has facebook as the homepage, and if you use facebook, that they ditch usage does not count against your data count against your data account for the month. there is twitter zero and wikipedia zero, google free zone. it is an interesting thing where people would say -- there are a number of people who believe

these are network neutrality products. it is giving privileged position to one app oath in terms of its visibility on the phone, but it's not costing as much as the others. there has been a lot of objections to it. people from to the india, china, africa. they say this is how we're going to get the next 4 billion connected. it allows people to buy cheaper data plans, and very much committing to it. thell don't use the network same way. my friends use social media. that seems to be all they do. i use e-mail, mapping functions, things they don't use. it is a one-size-fits-all where every device has to be everything to everybody, the myth of the one screen. i think you are narrowing consumer choice by not letting providers come up with new solutions and new approaches, and maybe there are people who

really do want -- there are people who want a great camera on their phone and are willing to pay extra for it. maybe we optimize the phone. it doesn't do everything perfectly, but it's a great phone. other people want real-time gaming, world of warcraft. think we will we broadly move away from the idea of neutrality where all applications have to pay the same price and operate the same way. i will give you another example, financial services. we often think about this debate in video. to me, financial services are a great example. microsecond latencies, perfect records -- those are not services the internet currently supports. very different profile. they have exited. they have to plummet through a private network. that bandwidth is not available. i'm not on my computer.

i'm not using that bandwidth. other philadelphia residents can use it right now. it is sharing bandwidth. when you force someone to exit the network, you are killing the genius that makes the sharing of bandwidth that makes the internet so efficient. >> we are going to redo a quote by reed hastings and get your reaction. forhould not have to pay your network if you don't pay for our content. hastings -- it is an interesting problem. the way i would analyze the issue is much simpler. one way or the other, the consumer is going to pay for all the content and the services. the consumers are the source of the value here. what we're fighting over is how that payments will be structured. will it just be one payment to your cable provider, and that is it and they don't get any money the question or --

is how do you structure those numbers. one of the things that strikes me, if you have a world in which netflix pays nothing to comcast and netflix is one third of the internet and still growing, the process will have to expand. they will have to do that regardless. that is the world we are in. are going to have to charge every one of their users more for that higher capacity, which will cost them real costs. there is going to be a bunch of people out there who are not network users who are going to pay for capacity which is primarily for video. another way to structure this is netflix is been attending from this expanded capacity. we need more bandwidth from the comcast/verizon/at&t's of the world.

both parties are going to benefit from it, both will bear some of the cost. >> professor, one of the contentions by some of the companies like netflix to have called for net neutrality regulations is a fear of having a sort of check on potential business plans, in order to gain any sort of leverage in a high-bandwidth service, the fundamental question is whether or not you can get an isp to privilege your service. does facebook zero or wikipedia zero percent -- prevent the emergence of a competitor to one of these services down the road? >> it enhances their ability. you have a different set of partnerships, people with expertise, some with financing, building, guaranteeing.

that competition to me is much more open and much freer. what it means is -- one of our divide. is the digital there is a fascinating study that talks about two sec staffers and two people from an organization called connected nation. they're building out underserved people. two 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. ist of what we see happening by saying i don't see the value. take this phone with facebook and you can talk with your grandkids and it will be free. thet won't cost you on margin, anything more. that they understand. one of the things we're trying to do is crack the nut of the ,eople who have not adopted it and the ability to partner with people like facebook, wikipedia, twitter have been proving very

helpful. the best example in the u.s. is t-mobile plus music freedom plan. you can stream music. incredibly popular with consumers trade -- consumers. thebile is trying to change way it does business in little bit to attract new customers at a time when they have had a lot of trouble doing that. to me, that is the genius that makes a whole internet space so great. we have these people trying a bunch of different things. lower this offering income consumers a portion of the internet increase the odds of them adopting the full internet, or does it condition them to accept a restricted set of services as online connectivity? >> we don't have great data on this. both scenarios are plausible. other people would say having a limited connection is better than no connection at all. the question is as opposed to

what. what strikes me is we all don't use the entire internet. if you look at any usage, i go to maybe a dozen places regularly. bank, a handful of things. willingly pay more for a better connection to my office even if that meant it was essentially disadvantaging the others? absolutely. that would affect how i use the internet. the idea people getting stuck on something is a strange concept to me. 48% of phones in the u.s. last year were feature phones. feature phones don't do very much. overhave strict control apps. they do a handful of things very well.

and they were cheap. 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. in many ways, your question may even be wrong. there are some consumers the what they really want is youtube trade maybe we ought to find them away to give them a cheap phone the delivers to them exactly what they want. in a world where we are trading a phone on an average of 18 months, i personally think the chance of getting stuck is very low. up five isle giving the with these partnerships -- privacy with these partnerships? >> yes, and it should not surprise them. we talked about free apps. whether it is search, google, bing -- we have e-mails.

anyone one of a number of providers for free. word processing, all your office needs. they are not free. they are advertising. research shows 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 if they didn't. in many ways, people look at europe and see their lack of an app environments. they have very restrictive privacy policies. as a result, advertising-based web services do not generate as much revenue. one of the things i tell my students, if you are getting a software that has value for free , you are not the consumer, you are the product. you are being resold to somebody else. if you don't want to give up your privacy, you should expect to pay for value. if someone is giving you something you use to pay for in the online world, you should be

fully aware that they are making money off of you through advertising. i guarantee they are doing that by looking at your private information. we have solutions to that. providers, other places that do completely private actions and then they leave it up to the consumerist -- consumers to go where they want to go. >> do you think consumers are aware that they are having their information trafficked or sold to the extent to which you said? the other aspect of the internet , most people agree 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. how will these dynamics play out, and is there a possibility people will lose trust in this ecosystem of free software? >> yes, there is a potential

problem to lose trust. the internet was never designed to be secure. the idea of bad actors on the internet -- it wasn't designed for that. that is an example to me of how the network is evolving. some people want a lot of security in the network, if you are doing cloud-based stuff. -- as weoard, your cpu know, can't stuff isn't that secure. isn't thatuff secure. now we have an architecture where somebody says maybe not for everything, but for certain things i might want some security. if you have ever use the encryption things, it slows everything down. everything has to be processed. even if it is all transparent to you, it is cumbersome. youtube videos, i don't really need encryption but for certain other things,

e-commerce transactions, then we are starting to see a very different world in what we will see is very 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 very funny. you have this rash of news, whether it is a home depot or target, kmart, any number of retailers. i started to look into this a little bit rate a lot of times the problem is not the internet, it is the scanners in the store which is using 20-year-old to 30-year-old technology which is extremely expensive for them to update. on some level, there is a hardware problem at the retail level which could be solved in a different way. professor, are we putting band-aids on the system that wasn't meant to be secure in the first place? of a national

science foundation funded project where we were trying to rethink what would happen if we redesigned from scratch. if you look at the engineering literature, they say there is a bunch of things the internet doesn't do well, security being one of them. not designed to do this. every time i move they would have to update records all over the internet. other people said we should do this more directly. my computer typically has three connections to the internet. i have a wi-fi connection. i may have a usb port plugged in. we have started to think about how we could rethink all this. other people will say this basic

architecture that is now 40 years old has done great. if it ain't broke, don't fix it. all the fancy things with engineers what to do with it, there's a good case to saying maybe we are putting band-aids but the band-aids are working. called "therticle internet only just works." , we areis saying is reinventing it but somehow we get the duct tape and a wire in the right place every single time and maybe that is the new normal. and's a good argument to, something we need to study and make a decision. >> could you foresee an internet architecture 2.0? >> we are seeing it now in parallel in many ways. i hear a lot of talk about we can't fragment the internet. there's more than one now. there is private networking that

exists. if it really needs to be secure, you are not going to put it on the public internet. our we need -- see thousands of parallel networks, and some of them are using principles inconsistent with the internet. there is a wonderful organization called internet two, a collection of mostly universities. say, we tried it, it doesn't work. product, which we call circuit-switched network. style for large data applications. if we were in a virtual reality world where you were watching and i was in philadelphia and we were using the data to duplicate this environment, there would be tons of data moving back and forth and with enough bandwidth, we can do it. approach violates have a

dozen basic internet principles. if you are a network. purist, you would say it is a [indiscernible] an interactive world that is the internet. for that application, that's the only way it's going to work. that is why we have to think broadly about it and not be too hypnotized by the use case of today, which is video. that is a use case of today. case fivethe use years ago. if i knew the use case for five years from now, i would be enjoying my life on the beach. none of us are that smart. >> coming back to where we started, the internet as you articulated has come to mean so many things to so many people, which is why this net neutrality upate at the fcc stirred such a public reaction. is it fair to say first that this debate 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? you spoke to some of the demographics of that. the second thing is, what do you think of the proposal as chairman tom wheeler issued in april? >> i do think the network neutrality debate is mostly about the quality of connection. it talked about with zero rating programs, there is a separate question. maybe we should be thinking about how to stimulate investment in the network and how to make it cheaper to connect those people. demographically, if you look back at the old proceedings from the 2010 order, a huge number of state and local politicians voted. almost overwhelmingly democratic. they said don't do it. 70 house democrats said don't do it. >> you mean reclassification? >> even the 2010 order.

if you can't manage, the only way you can maintain is by building more capacity. more capacity makes networking more expensive. making it more expensive makes it harder to reach rural areas. they tend to be rural politicians who did not want to make networking more expensive. that is the flipside of what you're talking about. minority populations tend to rely on wireless devices. they have a very particular set of profiles. senior citizens have a different set of barriers. forhould customize products them. handing them the new iphone 6, that is not going to do it. when i think about this, i like .om wheeler's original proposal the term is used throughout the

long and lots of lots of contracts in ways that are helpful. if it is within industry practice, it's reasonable. if it's not, we do this analysis to figure out how far -- if it're trying something new, is like no one else has done this before, you can't do it. that is a great way to kill innovation. the thing i like about the proposal is it is likely to withstand legal review. the fcc last in court twice. they don't want to go down that road a third time. they are also worried if they lose this one, it will kick over to the next administration. they have got to do something that will survive judicial review this time. is a way to get past the world we are in the love people to innovate and evaluated on a case-by-case basis. -- allow people to innovate and evaluate on a case-by-case basis.

what some people want to do is apply the old regime of telephone regulation to the internet. the default answer is no, unless you come to the fcc and get permission. that is when we talk about title two and forbearance. there are two thinks. if they are worried about prioritize asian, even net neutrality proponents will say title ii regulation never prevented you from having different classes of service. to have nine different classes of service minimum under that title to -- t itle ii rule. if you are subject to a rule until you get the fcc to sign an order, minimum six months from the procedural alone. that is under the best case scenario.

this could take a year, couple years, or he could never get done. i organized an event two weeks culver, whoff invented fun it -- he became the father of bondage -- vonage. he said i'm intrigued her. mehim, he said, if you make come to a washington agency and get permission, i will do it somewhere else. i worry about some of the proposals. i want to preserve that flexibility for people who come up with strange ideas. >> professor christopher yoo of the university of pennsylvania, please come back. created by america's

cable companies 35 years ago and brought to you as a public service by her local cable or satellite provider. on this we can's "newsmakers take our guest is bernie sa nders. as chairman of the veterans affairs committee, he discusses changes to the v.a. under the leadership of veterans affairs secretary robert mcdonald. he also talked about the results of the midterm elections as well as the presidential race in 2016. here is a preview. >> i have gotten to know bob mcdonald in the last couple of months. i like him very much. sloan his assistant gibson are working really, really hard. v.a. is a huge system and you can't bring change overnight. i think what bob is talking about, what the secretary is talking about is you can fire anybody but you don't want to lose on appeals.