world of mass surveillance where the internet is converted to a place where we can be watched and monitored and that's what makes what you said so insightful is, yeah he talks , about encryption and talks about surveillance technologies, but ultimately, it would was a deeply human perspective that drove him to do what he did, deeply noble and selfless . because he wanted these connections that could be made exclusively in a world where there is privacy that continue to flourish and he knew that's what was being destroyed and that more than anything, i think, is what drove him to do what he did. excellent observation. thank you. [applause.] >> thank you so much. well, i can't think of a better place to leave it than there. on behalf of this audience, and i think i am going to go ahead and say on behalf of canadians, i want to thank you not just for being here but shocking us into awareness. and i'm going to speak on behalf

of canadian journalists and they will not like that, but i want to thank you for challenging us to reinvigorate ourselves and our purpose in this country. glen greenwald, thank you very much. >> thank you. really appreciate it. [applause.] >> thanks so much . >> thank you, everybody. thank you, good night everybody. >> a a discussion on internet regulations between content providers and service providers. and then a form on internet privacy. after that, president obama announces his nominee for attorney general.

>> c-span been veterans day coverage begins tuesday morning at 8:30 eastern during washington journal with an interview with american legion director. and then it can :00, the annual uso gala. -- at 10:00, the annual uso gala. to the annual wreathlaying cemetery at the tomb of the unknowns. afternoon, a discussion on a veterans mental health issues, and that a selection from the medal of honor ceremonies. >> the fcc is considering a plan that would allow the agency to regulate how internet flows between content providers and internet service providers. a final ruling is expected by the end of the year. at least the concept of open -- at issue is the or nett of open internet fo

neutrality refers to a system where providers get equal access to all providers. 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 is a member of penn's 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 and have an audience that includes both 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. and thank you, karen. and i want to thank the fordham center for sponsoring this event. we are going to do way better than have your eyes glaze over.

we are going to aim for an active elucidation of this lively and 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 right here with my old friend micah sifry and i know him going back to when he was a writer for "the nation." but more recently he works for the democracy forum author of a new book called the "big disconnect." why the internet has not transformed politics yet. good line, i agree with the premise. to my left is tim wu, you may recognize him from his recent unsuccessful yet wildly successful campaign for lieutenant governor with 39% of the vote. >> 40%. 40.1. >> that is amazing with no

background in politics. his background is "slate" writer. they tend to over perform unexpectedly. he is the author of a book called "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 lastly, next to him, jeffrey manney. until recently, a law professor at lewis and clark. and now he runs an organization that he founded, i will have to put my reading glasses. to read the title. international center for law and economics based in portland, oregon. and for the first round here, i would like each of you to be as neutral and descriptive and diagnostic and explanatory as possible. because i think before we get into the weeds of the issue i think it is very important to try to have the philosophical perspective, a historical 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 and for devoting attention to this issue of importance and concern. i want to try to discuss why it someat is and give 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. there were people people beating drums. camping outside the fcc. i have to tell you when i started working on this issue in the 2000's, we would be lucky to have 10 people show up. to a talk or something. it was an obscure academic issue. there's a lot of reason why net neutrality has become an important issue. i want to describe some of the

issues i think it raises or fractures. it raises in our time questions of the power of private power in particular, and in particular the monopoly power 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. the internet has been an incredible engine of speech and some people feel it will be a threat. in the sense that there may be a fast lane or slow lane created by the end of net neutrality, it puts in place some of the issues of equality or inequality which seem so striking in american society right now. the idea that what feels to many people like public infrastructure might work better for some speakers and for other -- than 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. so i think that is telling. if you go back into the history of this issue, you date it from as far as you want and i would date it back to the nation-state and 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, that is basic essentials 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 -- those were always provided by government, the roman empire builder the roads.

the degree to which the government would build the infrastructure was it, that was the description. now, that began to change 500 years ago, particularly in england is spreading to the united states with a model where we would have private actors build what might've been otherwise they consider public infrastructure. have private innkeepers or private ferry operators and some operate under regulation or rules they gave the public -- that give them 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 what exactly the rules should be for these kinds of businesses, which are private businesses. but somehow invest it with a

public function. it's not enough to say that infrastructure, everyone thinks "the new york times" or "slate" are businesses, but they seem to be different. when it comes to the internet, a -- what we have is a project originally funded by the government. built in its initial stages by the government, but later largely taken over by private companies. today, dominated by the private. it's 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 quasi- 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 21st-century? in a certain way we are asking , is the broadband internet the same as the electricity was or

in the 20th century or water was in the 20th century. that is the basic introduction. in some ways, it is defining what citizenship is and i will leave it there. >> i know you will want to respond. before you do could you just , bring us up to speed on where we are in layman's term on this issue? there have been a few court decisions, the fcc has a ruling pending. there was the interesting spectacle of the president who is charge express his opinion and public. strongly in favor of net neutrality. what -- where are we on this issue? >> ok, briefly, sort of picking up where tim left off. he started with the beginning of the nation-state and fast-forward to the 2000. yada, yada, yada.

to everything in between. we have the internet, broadband. telephones, telecommunications services have been regulated by the fcc for many years since 1934. and along comes in this new thing called broadband. and over broadband as you know of course, will -- we did a lot more than talk to each other. there is no longer a single purpose telecommunications network. something capable of doing everything at what came to be characterized as an information service. this is important. i decided i was not going to be the annoying illegal details. -- annoying illegal details. 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 an information service subject to 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 that was accurate and from the arguments that others have -- had said, it was a need to treat the internet differently, recognizing the different ideals that tim mentioned. he proposed something called the 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 didn't. it is not entirely clear. i will be a little contentious here. it is not clear that it did not ever work. it was only asserted not to be working and we need more rules. there were court decisions. we can elaborate later. but the courts continue to throw out the fcc's efforts to impose stronger rules. in 2010, the most fulsome set of rules were promulgated. in january this year, the court threw out those rules as exceeding the fcc authority to regulate the internet. and now where we are today, , those rules have been thrown out. we have a new chairman tom wheeler. he is trying to find a new way to regulate the on to these four

freedoms but consistent with the limitations that the court imposed, they try to reimpose the rules. chairman wheeler proposed something mprm, another set of rules. those rules were meant immediately with a massive outcry, massive opposition, the likes that never been seen before. these protesters that tim was talking about. but this is opposition from the left. not the same kind opposition to regulation that we have seen before, it was opposition that said you have not gone far enough. you have to do something far more substantial here. in this case, the argument was you have to impose these title ii common carrier regulators, treat the internet like it is a water utility, electric utility. as tim suggested. and now, we are waiting to see what happens. chairman wheeler proposed the set of rules that do not go that far. but he asked a number of questions suggesting he would be

open to the possibility of title to regulation. and we have had millions of pages of the fcc's record about this and hours of events like this and millions of words in publications like jacob, assessing, really, right now, the question of whether we should treat the internet like a common carrier or something less. but, and maybe it can segue for you. the issue underlying regulation of the internet at all 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, i think, debating the merits or demerits of the arcane legal 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?

>> that was precisely the right amount of explanation, thank you. before we go back into that, i want to ask about the political stakes. this is often framed as an issue of open internet versus close internet and the issue of free expression and political expression. the week before last i was in turkey. having meetings about press freedom there. 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. with things he politically disagreed with. are, -- there, political censorship of the internet is very clear. we are taught by different bandwidth speeds, isn't a rhetoric a little inflated to frame it that way. >> [indiscernible] there's no question we are not living in turkey. so to stay with that example for a minute. >> now on?

>> to stay on the turkey example. it is worth noting that when the protests broke out about a year ago over a government proposal to bulldoze a park and put up a shopping mall and to do so against the wishes of the local community, the state media and private broadcast media in turkey did not cover this at all. and 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. so that 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 trying to cast your mind back to maybe 20 plus years ago he for we had the internet at all, before we had social networking, before we had e-mail, we had mainstream media. and it was a fairly -- much more closed system. if you wanted to be heard by the larger society, you have to get -- had to get through a gatekeeper. an editor that what you had to say was valuable and those gatekeepers were not a particularly diverse group. we had a much more constrained national conversation as a result. so what we have now is absolutely a much better situation of an open media system thanks to the open internet. but, that said, i think this argument about net neutrality is part of a larger argument of

-- over the merits of open versus closed systems. and i think i can illustrate with a recent example. because the fact of the matter is that there are services on the internet that are more open and services a more closed and the philosophical issue if -- issue of whether everybody has equal access and equal opportunity to reach everybody else with her message is playing out in real-time and many other ways. not just a question of if the owners of the pipes have to not discriminate in terms of the content they carry. and what they charge for that. 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 there almostets 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. but if you were on facebook, you did not see this at all in your news feed for the first few days. what you saw was something else. you saw the als ice bucket challenge. the reason so many people saw the ice bucket challenge opposed to the ferguson challenge is because facebook has a different algorithm of what they put on your newsfeed been twitter. basically, facebook put what they think you will want. and behind it, they have a commercial interest in not upsetting their users they want to keep their users happy and in a mood to pay attention to

facebook's advertisers. twitter and its algorithm is want -- byirected what you the user have chosen to follow. facebook, because it can, throttle's news feed and will charge you to reach all of your friends. simply, that the issue of the 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 -- subtly shaped and throttle d and limited by private interests. >> i am not sure i totally agree with you about how facebook' is a log rhythm works but we do not need to get into that. 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 know, you pay the more you use. it does not necessarily work that way. in practice, isn't this mainly from the point of view of the carriers, commercial issue about whether they can charge more to the people we use the -- who use the most of it? >> no. >> why not? >> i do not think that is the issue. that is how it is framed to rhetorically suggest it is a simple issue that the government should stay away from but it is much more, less than that. -- much more complicated than that. it can be expressed as simply payment. if it were -- that hides the complexity of the issue. so my position, now we are on the advocacy side, i think in our era, it has become one of the essentials and should be regarded as a public utility.

i think there was maybe a different story 15 years ago when we were trying to do -- incentivize 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. and what you want from 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. now, what the carriers have long wanted and i can understand the this, is theon for ability to differentially tax 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 for those type of deals. but i think the public interest augers against it. it comes to the idea there are

some businesses which are in the nature of public infrastructure. i will give you an example. if you imagine the brooklyn bridge, i could say the george washington bridge, but more politically loaded. [laughter] if they were to -- if they were privately owned and favored one pizza delivery company over another, you could sort of immediately see how it works competition. and uber has a competitor called lyft and uber gets over and it tips competition in favor of uber. for example. i think in a way that hurts the internet, because it derails fair competition. i will also say when we talk about speech, the idea that rich speakers get better access to people is to some great -- some degree inevitable but we

should not try to facilitate. one interesting thing about the internet is that it has achieved a rough parity. not perfect parity, and you still have to be good, but it is possible for a really well-informed thoughtful blogger to compete with the opinion page of "the new york times" for fox -- or fox news and that is a function. in a world of great inequality, we have enough inequality as it is, i think we do not need more. in have it be the only people who have money. we have enough of that problem already. >> this question of public utility ties in and what is a -- ties into the question of what is a natural monopoly. electricity and water clearly are. and there are a lot of places where you have one of them or way of accessing broadband internet -- more than one way of accessing broadband internet and it might be a function of a monopoly for consumers in new york.

it certainly does for me, i only have one way to get broadband where i live. >> one way of getting cable broadband. you can access through uverse or verizon. i do not know which is in new york. >> it may not be available for everybody. but in five years, it might, and we look forward to that period. the question of whether tim is right and if it is a public utility and if it should be treated like a public utility. >> to answer your immediate question, to the extent that in issue may be an economic what, a problem of monopoly, if that is the fear they may be adding -- anti-competitive conduct and it does not add competition, we have laws the deal with it and they are called antitrust laws. we also have consumer protection laws. part begs the question in -- i am not saying it is an answer, it begs the question why

we need to build an enormous new apparatus to try to achieve this thing that at the root is a problem perhaps, if it's a problem, of insufficient competition when we have lost -- laws that deal with it. on some of the issues that tim was talking about, the implications, whether true or not, i definitely take issue with the characterization of what the effects would be of allowing prioritization and what the effects would be a -- of a forced mandated neutrality. the important thing to recognize is that we have nothing approaching neutrality right now. nothing. there's nothing neutral about the internet. what is most interesting is far from that constraining bob loblaw's law blog from accessing, the parties that are

advocating for more regulation for common carrier treatment are enormously rich. netflix, google, facebook, companies like those are advocating for net neutrality and that should give you a bit of pause and you shall wonder if there is a reason they are advocating for the little guy. the little pizza guy who will allegedly be harmed if he does not have access to the fast lane, or whether there might be something else going on. one of the things we should consider going on here is prioritization is actually really, really useful and important precisely for the startup, the unknown company that needs some way of trying to distinguish itself from the incumbent. the incumbent has a massive consumer base and easy access to financing. name recognition, all kinds of things. piddlyng comes this startup that is looking to make sure the incumbent's customers can find the new guy.

unfortunately, like it or not, especially in a world where we have so much information out there, it is not enough to be better. you have to find a way to make sure that people who are your potential customers know you are better. well, one potential way of doing that is getting some form of prioritization. you can call advertising or promotion. it is effectively be same thing. i can tell you one thing that is a likely consequence if we were to close any ability for the startup or anybody to access, it can only mean they would be spending more money on other forms of promotion and prioritization which probably means buying more ads on google. now, didn't i just mention that google is in favor of net neutrality? there is a possible explanation as to why. i would add 100 additional points but let me add one in particular because i this great quote from tim. it is useful to bring it up.

tim says, " consider that the driver charges you the posted rate and take you where you go and that is common carrier in action." i think that is right. title two, treating it like a common carriage is like outlawing uber. the problem with the overregulated the internet is across the internet into a kind of status quo. as a matter of requirement, if you are going to impose regulations in ways that outlaw certain conduct we can conceive of and allow other conduct and most we can conceive of is conduct happening right now. it will enshrine those forms of conduct and impede innovation, new business models and ways of structuring not only the internet but the very content providers, who are the beneficiaries of his net neutrality regime. i think we have to be really

careful before we impose essentially mandate the business models of the internet of yesterday. we better be sure were not tlawing theou business models of the future. >> there is real common ground. you both think it is working. the internet is working pretty well so far. you, tim, think it's partly because companies have not been able to differentiate. they have not been able to commercially regulate the market and say -- the carrier. and jeffrey, you think that the risk is government. government regulating the internet. but really, both of you like it pretty well the way it works right now. and, you know, the question is in a way what is the definition of an unregulated -- an internet without unhealthy regulation?

you say the unhealthy regulation is government and you see the unhealthy regulation is what the carriers would do without government. >> that is right. but unlike the carriers acting without regulation, the government has an obligation to defend. the carriers can do what they want, like it or not, until they run afoul of the law. primarily the antitrust laws read but -- laws. but the government has defended its imposition and one of the big issues at least to me, there is really -- as we were just discussing, no evidence anything bad has ever happened. >> that is not true at all. >> i couple of little, tiny things that we can debate of the three examples anybody can come all went. but generally speaking, as tim agrees, the internet works pretty well. even if they are things that may have gone wrong, isn't enough? is it enough evidence for a paradigm shift in regulation or

is there not enough? and while there might be problems down the road, the only valid course right now is restraint and humility and we shall wait until the problems materialized because we do not have enough evidence. to impose stringent regulations. >> yeah, i wanted to object to this consensus that in the internet works pretty well right now. most of us are being overcharged for service that would, we should be embarrassed by. we are paying first world prices for third world service. and a kid in south korea can get to the library of congress website 100 times faster than a kid in the south bronx. if that kid in the south bronx can even afford to buy broadband service for one of the monopolists, who may not be choosing to put fast service into their neighborhood -- they

have already cherry picked the rich neighborhood. there are a lot of premises it got thrown past us. the idea that jacob, we might in five years see more competition or faster services being provided when verizon has already said they are not going to build fios any further than they already have one-stop for most people, unless you want to pay exorbitant prices or moved -- move to one of the few cities that either google or a mass -- municipality that is putting this new gigabit level of internet service, we are never going to catch up large chunks of the rest of the industrialized world takes for granted at a price a fraction of what we paid. so let's not likely to the -- say that the internet works well now. from the consumer's point of view, it does not work well at all. >> to be clear, what i meant, we agreed it works well in terms of fostering innovation and allow

ing and encouraging free expression. >> he makes a good point. part of a broader debate about how we feel about private power in telecom. i would side with the view that the antitrust laws have not been in adequate and we have serious problems and we should open the door. as time goes by, thinking of things -- if you have a continued trend toward more consolidation, towards a few companies being in charge and over a pretty important public facility, i think that national -- that naturally invites by any economist description, a company -- a monopoly that shows no sign of disappearing at all or 2 companies charge monopoly prices, as some point, you have to say, just the price you are going to charge. there is no question.

the case for rate regulation and also saying you need to provide access to more people in exchange for the monopoly is strong and that's what to do with cable. i am not saying at this moment about is necessary, but i do not want to close the door when we have constraints. the government should never say we will allow it monopolist charge excess of the price of the costs because the internet is special. there is no reason to have that kind of role. the government needs to supervise monopoly. it needs to keep prices. one of the things i am concerned about -- this is a inequality issue, the sense that while middle-class salaries are flat, the essentials keep getting more and more expensive. internet service being one example and cell phone service. being another great example read these prices -- example. these prices keep going up.

some of these issues are not just tech issues and are becoming issues of what it means to be middle class in this country. we should not taken off the table. >> you know, and i think this is an important question is whether the carriers are going to become more like monopolies are less likely monopolies? i think it is fair to say that most people experience them now as companies that behave like monopolies. i certainly do. but i am not confident, i do not know which way it will go. there may be real competition in markets that do not have much of it down the road or imago in the other direction. what do we think? -- it may go in the other direction. what do we think? >> making net neutrality policy on the basis that people hate comcast is a bad idea. >> but if comcast is a monopoly and if it stays a monopoly -- >> it is not clear that comcast is a monopoly. there is at least one other competitor in about everywhere. we are talking about broadband here. it is true for cable as well.

but, let's focus on broadband. there is at&t or verizon pretty much everywhere in the country. there are other options, as well, centurylink and other companies that are investing enormously in their networks. and one of the things that is hard to figure out is why these monopolist have invested trillions of dollars and have demonstrated ever improving speeds relative to the costs of content and not especially rapid increases in prices, prices have generally gone -- ait that is not , true. prices have gone up way past inflation. like 1800. you are talking about cable video. >> the point is that we are not experiencing exactly -- i understand that people hate comcast. their customer service is terrible. we would all rather pay less for

whatever it is we want. all of these things are true but we have to be careful about translating that kind of conflict into and i want to bring it back to that neutrality into the detailed and potentially counterproductive rules we are talking about. here are it because we are not -- tim, maybe this was a burst of honesty on your point at what you are saying is i wanted a backdoor way to essentially nationalized this infrastructure that i believe should be offered essentially by the government or the very minimum, regulated so heavily by the government it is essentially indistinguishable from if the government was offering it. that is not what net neutrality was intended to be. that does not the problem the rules are intended to address. if that's a problem you see, we should talk about it differently. but again i do not agree with , the premises here, i think it is a real problem going from those premises to title 2,

common carrier for the benefit of the problem or benefit of solving the supposed problems we have in the net neutrality debate. >> my position with the amount of regulation is that i do not have an idea of the amount of regulation and less to do with competition. i have been involved for 15 or more years now and i the waiting and waiting for the market entry of four or five or six to make a rigorous and competitive market for delivering cable and internet service. and, you know, i am happy verizon built in some high expensive neighborhoods in google has wired 2 cities. but overall, the state of competition is poor. when you wait and wait, as opposed to sitting there is saying one day competition will come so we should not say anything because competition will be coming.

i think we need to act and restrain what are -- you have to act on the facts. comcast is acting like a monopoly. they have raised their price. you do not like the word uopoly.y, we will use d >> trillions in infrastructure and every year increasing speeds. when you take account of the government subsidies other -- offered in other countries, the services are not necessarily more better and cost more. it is easy to again criticize what we have, but it is not at all clear what we have is worse than what others have. nor more expensive red -- expensive. more relevant to the neutrality debate is, what are the costs we are bearing of this? if it is the case that our service is not as good as south korea's and perhaps that is one or two countries where it is

true, what are we losing and how much are we willing cost and burden are willing to there to correct this potentially very small actual costs? >> can i get rid of the heart of net neutrality, then. so net neutrality, the internet has been an economic golden goose that has laid some golden eggs. 20 or 30 years ago people were , asking if the united states was finished as a technological power. it seemed like japan and other countries were ahead. there's little question when look at the world's top 10 companies, they are almost all american. and i think being the home of the internet, and open internet, a neutral internet has a lot to do with it. you said startups would do better on a pay to play internet. where they can pay for it. and there is no -- that is just a mythology. if you ask the startups themselves, they do not want to start their business negotiating with comcast or verizon for a

n extra payment when we have no money compared to our direct competition which would be google or an established company who has a lot more money. it is clear that non-neutral favors incumbent, not just google in favor. when you look at companies, it is new york companies, spotify. it is companies that are struggling to get into the market and know they will be distorted if comcast -- destroyed if comcast. >> i want to pursue this point. which is the question of what the absence of net neutrality would likely look like? i was just thinking about one example, it is not broadband access. but the wireless carriers are verizon, offering certain content with no data charges.

attached to it. that comes in the form of not directly translatable. but that turns out to be very appealing. the idea that you will not run up data charges if you are reading certain things. watching certain things. it is the dystopian version, but what is the kind of realistic version of what happens if the fcc does not mandate going forward? >> you get more of those things -- there are people that are very critical of -- >> good or bad -- >> a great thing. >> our media will look more like television again. >> how do you mean? >> television is free and only to the extent it is paid by advertisers. if you are someone that attracts a lot of advertising -- you are describing jacob, it is already

exists in parts of the third world. it is called facebook zero. what facebook is doing in africa and asia is saying, everybody wants facebook, we will let you bundle facebook with your phone. and if people just open the phone to get on facebook, there will not be data charges. so from the point of the view of the user, they are getting facebook for free. but what they do not realize is that they are not getting onto the internet at all. >> they may actually know that. it is the height of first world hubris to say screw you, you want facebook, but you cannot have it because i know something that will be that are for you. and you do not even know how bad it is. >> yes, i do think that we have a value difference. an open system is better than a closed system. so i do not think i can be neutral about that. >> but if an open system means no internet at a closed system is at least i get facebook, i

would take a closed system. that maybe the relevant choice for many people. who can't afford anything more. >> how do i think things would look? i do not think the walls would fall down. but i think it would be a considerably different world for people thinking of starting new things. think about "slate" magazine started in the 1990's. were all the range of online magazine starting right now. range of online magazine starting right now. you have an idea and you put it out there and you see whether it works or not. so many startups, that's how they start. they take off or they do not. you start in the position you need to negotiate a deal and if you do not have a deal with verizon or comcast, the big four people, it starts becoming a permission driven system.

the internet become something where it is all about what the better deal as opposed to meritocratic. in my view it looks more like , cable television. the internet finally follows the path of cable. which was born around the same time as the internet. they have been different and the comes much more commercial. the final thing is probably the generation. facebook is quiet on net neutrality. google is relatively quiet except -- and they know that in a non-neutral world, they have the money to pay to get access over their competitors as they could destroy any serious -- or advantage themselves over any serious competitors. it locks in the incumbents. facebook, google, those companies are not overthrown and they stick around. >> but google and amazon are quite, the real debate is over title 2, whether we have common carrier rules. not whether we will have net neutrality. those companies are all in favor of net neutrality and in private conversation, probably opposed to paid privatization.

they are opposed to title ii common carrier rules because there is no evidence, no reason to think those roles were not apply to them as well. and it is another danger of the imposition of this massive regulatory apparatus that be careful what you wish for because you may end up hamstringing the very heart of the ecosystem. these content providers and edge providers that you are supposed to be benefiting by this. tim, i think your vision of what the world is going to look like it's too pessimistic. i mean i do not think there is , anything to suggest that it is likely to be the case in large part because we do not have any rules prohibiting private forward as a shim. -- prioritization. and that is not what it looks like today. because if you work through the economics of it, you realize that that is not clearly beneficial to the internet service providers either. they do not have a great -- we may disagree on exactly where they would fall and what amount

of the sort of unfettered content is in their best interests, but it is clear -- an example as much of the news. netflix and comcast are not simply at odds with each other. people pay for comcast because they can get net flicks. you have to be aware there is that synergy. that exists. that doesand provider not own sufficient content to attract people to the internet offer greatmake sure they are>d service, which they don't. >> they would still need the content, my point is i do know if this is where it would fall out, i can see margins on where the internet service provider deterthe content might some content providers but in general they have a strong interest in people getting

access to what they want. again, this vision of the small start up not being able to get access, but comcast does not care about them. comcast could care less whether the small startup is clogging its pipes. it cares about netflix because impose absolutely does some difficult engineering problems on the comcast network. a small garage startup, until they become the size of netflix, comcast does not even know that they exist. you could create a scenario were some evil person comes to comcast and says i hate pete -- hate these people and they are run by jews and we don't want them on the internet am a you

could construct that but that is not really likely how it will work out. netflix is going to have to pay comcast and its next competitor will go through because -- >> these are for-profit companies. i do not think they are evil, but today favor with has more money. -- they favor who has more money. it is quite a long way there. there are a few spaces in american society where smaller speaker to have a decent chance. i do not think comcast cares, but cares about the paste it. it is clear to me that speakers with money will get priority and you will see the speakers with less money like wikipedia, which is always struggling for money and does not run ads. the consumer space will get worse. in order to pay comcast, wikipedia will have to say we

to start running ads. the consumer will pay in the end. >> wikipedia has zero which is -- >> it is the kind of content that is not neutral. they have no good a model but people rely on it is the kind of content -- why would comcast let that -- >> i'm going to open it up for questions in a minute. >> wikipedia, you said. >> question for any of you. you see amazon dispute relevant here. you have a company with market power discriminating against specific content at down to the level of individual authors. they gave paul ryan a pass. it is a commercial dispute but

that they now have the power to do significant harm to the type of people you are talking about. there is no net neutrality that applies to amazon. is that the kind of thing you are worried about here? >> we need to be worrying about the new concentrations of power and if they are using their platforms in a neutral way or not. we can extend the logic that tim gave us talk about the net is a mutual platform. you talk about amazon's role here and that is worrisome. not saying we have to dissent -- defend the old publishing model and hold everything, but playing favorites in the way amazon seems to be doing is very troubling. >> jeffrey, are you cool with what amazon is doing? >> yeah, but i will take the

devil after its role -- devil advocate role and point out that as you said, net neutrality applies only to the internet service provider and not to any of the other alleged gatekeepers that tim has written about. it is really worth thinking through what happens when you mandate neutrality on one part of one level of this ecosystem, but can't or don't on others. a recent dispute between youtube and independent artists who do not get played unless they pay. there are any number. if comcast is a gatekeeper for an author.

thousands of examples -- you can think of thousands of examples like that. on the one hand, it means that, again, i mention bob's blog, if boblaw blog if they wanted to stop it, it would be easy. it is wordpress and -- what is his name? "arrested development" -- whatever. that is not the point. if it is standing on its own and it is wordpress. it is not adele versus comcast. it is youtube versus comcast.

it is important to bear in mind, a lot of the independent as small artists as craters, their access come through aggregation services that may have problems we can discuss. they help to counteract the perceived problem of having an isp as a gatekeeper. google versus comcast which is a much fair fight. >> many of them are not-for-profit. >> very few of them really matter and are successful. wikipedia is one of a very few examples. i am not saying it is across the board in happens everywhere. thing about the fact that dynamic exists and helps to moderate some of the perceived problems because there are very powerful entities who are potential he threatened by this room preciousness -- repatriciousness. if you tell the comcast, amazon, google, whoever has paid

intermediary to you are increasing their power. you have shifted the locus of any problem from comcast to google or youtube. in net neutrality debate about i am doing devil advocate a you are right about everything in respect to amazon are we better off if amazon has unfettered ability, no potential impediment to doing whatever it wants digital from isp direction? >> i do not understand how comcast is serving a check on amazon. comcast is acting -- and grabbing all types of rent money out of the company -- random money out of the company and that is bad. amazon is doing something else that is bad and some -- bad. >> the problem with youtube.

>> over here, don't you need to solve both of the problems? >> i want to take a few questions. you can keep talking but let me see if there are any hints. if you have a question, tell us your name and one quick question. >> my name is melissa and i am with a fellowship program called sense makers and we try to make sense of information on the internet. i used to do investigative reporting for all of the shows. i am finding you cannot have the same effect where you get somebody out of prison or a new vaccine on the internet. it does not happen. the internet smokes out in its own fashion very slowly compared to have everybody look at a topic.

at the same time, in different stratus of society. where do you see the internet having the same effect? >> if i understand your question correctly, what you are saying is basically back in the good old days, a program that "60 minutes" for a network news show could focus our attention on a problem and that would often lead to some fix. and today, we have a new kind of problem which is we have an oversupply of information, if anything the internet has made it too easy for us to speak. that's a topic i take up in my new book. what do we do about this? how do we refocus? yes? i would say -- the reasons why -- there are many reasons why in the united states why it seems as though our political and

governmental system is dysfunctional, they get the blame, it gets pointed back and forth. i would just suggest that part of the problem is our attention wanders to quickly now. we go from crisis to crisis and the system they used to then respond it immediately on to something else. the internet is causing a societal attention deficit disorder and we often would personally and our need to check for the latest e-mail, latest tweet instead of sticking on things. i think this may be something we can grow ourselves out of as we learn to better filter the media we are being surrounded with now. that is an open question. i am hopeful we can do that. i think you're absolutely right. it is a problem today.

>> other questions? if not, we can continue the argument we are having. yes? >> hi. last week, my internet stopped working and i have time warner. it turned out, we will not talk about the merger. that is the underlying question. time warner had stopped my service so that i could upgrade guessing -- if other people also have time warner maybe this happens to them, but they were offering me a better megabits per second

and previously i had 20 and the way they got my attention to offer that was to shut off my service he -- service. i do not think that was an isolated example. >> not only is that not an isolated example. the precise thing happen to me. >> that is a monopoly. >> if are going to start telling time warner or stories, we are -- >> that is part of leaving things as they are. >> i believe the merger should be blocked. i think we have a problem with unresponsive power in the cable sector. it's not -- some of the new neutrality things have been implicated. price is the thing that bothers me. the average bill for time warner since 1992 is between $12 and

$20. it has grown to over $100. the average comcast bill is $155 per customer. if comcast exceeds getting the money out of new yorkers that he got out of everyone else, $1.6 billion a year, cable companies are making enough money as it is. the merger should be stopped. everything they say are these vapid empty statements. when they try to back it up, they are just competitors for internet services. like a replacement for netflix. i think the merger -- there is nothing about the merger i have red that is in the public interest. the burden -- when people looked at this problem of over

concentration, they felt we should not allow these kind of mergers that are not in the public interest. comcast has yet to be the burden of proof. >> they don't bear burden of proof in an antitrust matter. >> not as a matter of antitrust. you have had an enormous amount of economics since 1910 that have developed since then. we have learned that concentration does not translate into monopoly power effects. this merger -- it would replace time warner with comcast in new york. as an economic matter, you have to make out a case why replacing another hasst with outcomes that are relevant to

the merger. a fact of the matter is, there are not any. you mention they exist, and they exist in different markets, with different products. i'm pretty sure comcast would say that their services better. we give you something more. we charge you more for it. they have to do a quality adjustment to the data you are throwing around. i do think you can say that they will simply replace the exact same internet that was costing you $105 with something for $155. they might. >> last question right here. hopefully it will give you each a chance for a brief last word. >> i am a lay person. i do not see where there is an anti-trust system working in this country where we have the concept of too big to fail. with hyper banks and other institutions -- i wish you would enlighten me with where this is actually working, because that is why we have this huge

concentration of wealth and whole countries being run out. >> i don't think that whatever the staters are -- standards are applied to comcast. there may be issues in the financial markets, and i suspect that if you want to look for blame there, i would not look at the antitrust economics or even the antitrust enforcement agents these, i would look alike higher up the chain to the white house and federal reserve. there are a lot of people with a lot of interest in treating those banks very differently than perhaps the antitrust authorities would. i don't know that they would have found it to be some actual economic basis for breaking up a banks, but i can guarantee you that there were a lot of political reasons why they didn't. this is not an antitrust problem. >> a lot of the debates that are going on in society today are on the divide -- the more fundamental level as to whether businesses usual, the system we had an antitrust him in

anti-telecom regulation, where we had something to do place regulation. we are not really worried about monopoly. we have we, flaccid enforcement ever since the reagan administration. everything has been great. we should continue that. maybe i am exaggerating. people like me think that there is time for change. we have a serious problem with inequality in this country exacerbated by the failure of the government to take serious action in antitrust, to restrain cable monopolies. to start thinking about what our the day-to-day costs that americans are facing. how is this economy working for normal middle-class people? our existing system has done some good things, has created some wealth, but has failed the middle class. therefore, we need to re-examine

from the bottom up rings like how we regulate the largest carriers and how we enforce antitrust law. i have very strong feelings about the theory -- that. >> i do agree with him. let me just see that the internet has gone from being a lucky accident to the network that connects all the networks. it is the functional equivalent of the dialtone of the 21st century. right now there is a kid sitting on the stoop of a public library branch somewhere in upper manhattan who cannot afford internet access at home and is sitting there because they are getting free wi-fi. people cannot even apply for jobs today if they don't have a way of getting online. when people go to public libraries, the first major use

in the library, when somebody signs up to use the computer, is to figure out how to put in their resume and apply for a job. this is essential to our economic lifeblood. the idea that we should take a blase hands off, let the big boys handle it approach is not one that we can afford. >> this was not billed as a debate. this was a very good one. i want to thank you all for participating. [applause] >>