Stuff You Should Know - Why is There a Battle Over Net Neutrality?

Episode Date: July 11, 2017

Net neutrality is the idea that the internet is a public good and that everyone should have equal, unfettered access to it. Though the FCC strongly supported it with new rules in 2015, today’s FCC is under new leadership and has other ideas. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

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Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey, everybody, stuff you should know is going on tour. Do, do, do, do. What are the dates, my friend? Okay, so starting August 8th in Toronto, that's in Canada. We're gonna be at Danforth Music Hall in then Chicago.

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Yep, so for all this information again, visually, and for links to tickets, just go to S-Y-S-K-Live.com. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant and Jerry's over there. So this is Stuff You Should Know, the podcast.

Correct. We are not going dark. No. Although that's a thing. It is a thing for the Battle for the Net Action Day. Battle of the Network Stars? Nope, just Net. Okay.

Battle for the Net. Yeah. Which I would guess most people have heard of, maybe not by that name necessarily, but say if you're a John Oliver fan or have been paying attention at all to the FCC rules about net neutrality, Battle for the Net is kind of at the forefront of all of that.

Yeah, and since our show comes out on a Tuesday, which is July 11th, and that is the day that some websites have elected to go dark. I think they're going dark the next day. Oh, on the 12th? Yeah. Oh, okay. All right, well then, I don't feel so bad.

Right, right. But we figured we were actually, someone wrote in suggesting this, then maybe instead of going dark, because you guys probably can't do that, maybe you should just do an episode on net neutrality to teach all the peoples about the things. Right, which I thought was a pretty good suggestion.

I agree, good suggestion. Yeah, and I feel bad that we, I can't remember who it was that wrote in, but thank you for that. Whoever it was, you know who you are, because you're the only one who did. Yeah, and they don't do it for the glory. No.

So what are we talking about, Chuck, when we're talking about net neutrality or network neutrality or open internet? So what that is, mainly what people mean when they say net neutrality is the idea that the internet is an open road and it doesn't have fast lanes or slow lanes. It is providing equal access to anyone

who wants to build a website, let's say, can throw it up there and have equal access to the big rollers on the internet with huge sites, you're all the same as far as how people can access you. Yeah. And whether or not they can access you. Yeah.

And how fast they can access you. Exactly, right? There was this, there's this great explainer in Vox about net neutrality that we used as a resource, but they gave this good example of net neutrality, right? So they pointed out that when Facebook was created, Zuckerberg didn't have to go to Comcast or Verizon or any of the ISPs, the internet service providers,

the companies that provide the last mile, the connection between your house and the public internet. Okay, that's what an ISP is. Very important to remember that part, right? Yeah. He didn't have to go to them and say, hey, will you carry my website on your network? He just built the website, plugged it into the internet,

uploaded it to the internet, and it was available to any device or computer that was connected to the internet anywhere in the world, right? Yeah. And the fact that he didn't have to go to them and ask to be added to their network, the fact that he didn't have to go to them to say, hey, I need people to be able to download this stuff fast.

So here's a bunch of extra money. The fact that he didn't do that, that's how it has been up to this point, and that is network neutrality. That's the basis of net neutrality, especially from the standpoint of developers and companies that create sites and applications on the web. Yeah, it's, wow, that's a very large spider crawling next to me.

Sorry, saw something out of the corner of my eye and I'm on cockroach alert because it's summer. Look out. Yeah. Nope, just a big spider. Let me let him go. Good for you. So it levels the playing field

and all internet traffic is treated equally. Right, so not only does it level the playing field for people who are creating Facebook or Netflix or what have you, it also levels the playing field or levels the experience for users, right? Yeah. If you're a user and you are on the internet

through your ISP, like you should be getting whatever site you wanna go to at the same speed as any other site and your internet service provider shouldn't be able to decide, we don't really like you getting that site. We don't really like you having that app. We're gonna make it so that this traffic moves so slowly,

you're gonna give up trying to download it or we're just gonna block it entirely. Yeah, and why? Maybe because that's a competitor to us in some way and we would like to serve you up our product faster. Right, so preventing ISPs from being able to do that, that's open internet or network neutrality, okay? Yeah.

That's the basis of it. That is currently how it stands right now. And the idea of network neutrality, it's I guess about 15 years old. Back in 2002, a guy named Tim Wu who is a Columbia University law professor now, I believe, coined the term network neutrality to basically describe a level playing field

for everybody involved, right? Especially at the internet service provider level. And since then it's become this topic of debate. Like should this be something that we all wanna adopt as like the basically the rules for the internet? Should network neutrality be the basis of how the internet is built and approached? Yeah, which is a big deal

because even though it seems like we're far along, we are still in the infancy stage of the internet and the impacts would be long lasting and huge moving forward. From what I understand, most people agree that net neutrality is at its basis an agreeable way to frame the internet. But that's the way it should be.

And there was even back in 2014 as we'll see, we just went through this and we're going through it again now. But back in 2014, there were a pair of polls that I ran across from two different groups. One of them is University of Delaware. Can't remember who the other one was. But it found that even among conservatives

that net neutrality is highly valued. Something like 80 to 83% of people who identify as conservative, say that ISPs should be prevented from slowing or blocking traffic, right? And that Congress should actually do something about it. So people by and large agree that net neutrality is the way the internet should go.

The division that has really kind of come out, especially recently, is how that good can be achieved. Do you achieve it by giving power to the FCC to go police the ISPs and find them and basically make life hard for them if they don't follow the rules? Or do you remove any teeth that the FCC might have in policing the ISPs and just leave it up to competition?

And depending on where you follow ideologically, as far as government regulation goes, is probably where you're going to fall along the spectrum of net neutrality. Yeah, and it's not a black and white thing like you would think, like the end user, just saying, yeah, there's gotta be net neutrality no matter what.

There's a lot of users who are like, I don't know, man, all I care about is streaming my stuff as efficiently and fast as possible. And if getting rid of net neutrality would increase that competition and I could get my Netflix movies awesomeer and faster that I'm all for it. Right.

Then on the other side, you've got big corporations that maybe don't feel like you think they might. Yeah, you would think that stuff like this, usually when the government's involved, it's like a big guy, big corporation versus little guy kind of thing. But no, there's a dispute between corporations too, like you said, where the ISPs like Verizon

and Comcast and AT&T are lined up against the tech companies, like the tech media companies like YouTube and Netflix and formerly Tumblr, some of the other guys Facebook, Google, where they're on opposite sides of this issue, which is strange because they need each other. They have very incestuous relationships that are very complicated and complex.

But as far as net neutrality goes, they are pretty much divided between ISPs and tech media companies. One side is against the net neutrality rules, one side is strongly in favor of them. Boy, and you talk about complicated, like in the future, corporations merging and then ISPs being a part of the same company

or getting into the media content game, like things are getting interesting, you know? Yeah, interesting, but also kind of scary because right now, back in, well, back in 2015, the FCC struck a huge blow to the ISPs with a set of new rules, 400 page compendium, I guess you would call it, of rules that basically said,

you guys can't mess around anymore, the ISPs are not allowed to block or throttle or provide fast lanes, stuff's getting real and the net really is gonna be neutral from now on. That was under Obama and Trump has appointed a different FCC chairman who was a member of the FCC before and he is not in favor of that at all. So do you wanna talk about what the 2015 rules are

and kind of how it is for the moment? Well, here's what I think we should do. I think we should take a break. Okay, all right. We should go back in time when we come back and talk a little bit about the phone companies, which will kind of set the stage for what's going on today. Okay, all right.

All right, we'll be right back. We'll be right back. S-Y-S-K. We'll be right back. We should now. S-Y-S-K. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor,

stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair.

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as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart Podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough

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Yeah, it is. It's amazing how much telephone companies have shaped law and policy in this country over the years. Yeah, yeah, I guess it is. Like with the telephone monopolies back in the day, I mean, that was, it's all very interesting. Yeah, you used to have to lease your telephone from the phone company.

Like people didn't buy telephones, you leased it. Yeah, wasn't there just one telephone company? Wasn't it just Bell? Yeah, basically. Mahbell. Yeah, and then they broke it up into the smaller bells. The baby bells, I think that's what they call them. This is all like for my childhood,

so I didn't really look up much of that. But we're talking about the FCC here as the governing body. And back in the 70s and 80s, they were sort of early in on this game with the phone companies in the early days of computer networking. And they came out really early on. They had a lot of foresight back then and said,

you know what? We need to guarantee consumers with the right to use modems on their phone lines. Yeah. Because this is like everyone's seen war games and we all know that that's how the future is going. Right. You got to put your phone on a big box.

Yeah. Your phone receiver on a big box. I wanted one of those so bad. Oh yeah, like they were so expensive. You literally connected your phone. Right, I had no idea what to do with it. I just thought like, well, that's computers plus. Yeah, exactly.

But treating the saying, OK, everybody has the right to have a modem in their house and to use a phone line to use it. That was kind of a radical idea. And the reason why is because when you're talking about telephone carriers, right, like back in the day, AT&T, right, Ma Bell, what you were saying is you're a private corporation.

You have gone and laid telephone wires all throughout the United States. You guys built the US telephone infrastructure. And yes, we, the government, the taxpayers, gave you substantial tax breaks and lots of benefits to doing this. And you guys are the ones making the money operating these phone lines.

But we have decided that the phone lines are so important to the public good that you guys aren't allowed to just be a normal corporation that the government stays laissez-faire, hands-off with. You guys are deemed order considered common carriers. Yeah, you're like a road. But yeah, well, you're like the people who carry people along roads, like goods and people, right?

You're like an airline. You're like a cargo transport ship. You're like a Greyhound bus, but with telephone lines, right? So the government said everyone should be able to have access to telephone lines. You can charge people for that access, but you can't mess with their access. We're not letting you.

And in the 70s, one of the things, or the 80s, I think, one of the things the government said was, hey, you know how we're kind of the bosses of you guys, even though you're private corporations? Well, we're going to boss you around right now and say, any business that wants to come along and use your phone lines to provide dial-up modem service to their customers, you have to let them do it.

Because it's for the public good. It was for the public good. And by doing that, the dial-up internet industry was able to blossom unfettered with government protection, right? The government got in between that blossoming industry that was in competition with the telephone companies and the telephone companies that could have

strangled it in the cradle. And that was the first big thing that the SEC did as far as the internet goes. Yeah, and in 1996, a very important distinction was drawn with basically Congress drawing up two categories. And this, you'll see, plays out kind of over and over, and will continue to in the future. Two different things, telecommunication services

and information services. So telecom services, we're talking about the phone lines, what we were talking about here. And as far as the law is concerned, there are a lot of, like you were talking about, legal obligations on these services. And the FCC has a lot of oversight and regulation over them. Yeah.

Information services, on the other hand, they said, like Facebook, that's an information service. YouTube is an information service. They were less, well, basically exempt for most of the FCC regulations. So dividing those things in two was a very, very big deal. And during the Clinton years, what most people would consider, what, Ajit Pai, which he is Trump's pick to chair the FCC,

he called the Clinton era, basically up through 2015, a light touch regulation, which is what he is in favor of. And we'll get to him a little bit more in a minute. But it's that Clinton era FCC regulations that basically did what you're talking about and said, you know what, we want DSL. That's the newest thing, forget dial-up. We want to send faster speeds over the internet.

And you all have to play along. So they did it again to the phone companies. They went to and said, remember dial-up models? No one wants that any longer. Everybody wants DSL. So now you guys have to let any DSL provider use your phone lines and that let the DSL, the beginning of the high-speed internet industry, flourish, right?

So there's this pattern of the FCC coming in and being like, you guys are huge. You guys who provide that last mile, you common carriers who are the gatekeepers between the public at large and the public internet, you guys stand in between them and we're saying, you can do this, you can't do that. You can do this, you can't do that.

And for a while, the ISPs were classified as telecommunication services, which meant that they fell under way more oversight and scrutiny, like you said, than say like YouTube. And the reason the government did this was to let the internet start to boom, right? Yes. And I'm not sure why. I guess because it was Bush era and the Bush FCC chair said,

we shouldn't be classifying ISPs as telecommunications companies anymore, but we have to. It's the law. He went to court and the court said, no, actually, you guys are the FCC. If you want to start classifying internet service providers as information services, which are not as heavily regulated, you guys go ahead and do that.

So the Bush era FCC said, oh, OK, well, we hereby decree that internet service providers are not akin to the Bell telephone switchboard operators of your. They're much more akin to YouTube. They're part of the internet, which, if you really stop and think about it, doesn't make much sense. But that was a huge sea change in what the government could say or do to ISPs.

It gave them way more freedom to do a lot more stuff after they were classified as information services. Yeah, and then in 2010, the chair of the FCC at the time, Julius Ginnikowski, said, you know what? We've got some new regulations on the books. We're going to prohibit ISPs from blocking content online. We're going to prohibit what we call unreasonable discrimination. And they're all going to have to be a little more transparent

about what's going on. And this is in the era of broadband now. And then Verizon stepped up and said, you know what? We don't like the sounds of this. This is you guys are stepping way over your congressional power here. Yeah, they said, well, don't forget. You guys classified us as information services.

You can't tell us to do or not do this stuff. We're not telecoms anymore, suckers. Yeah, pretty much. And the DC Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with Verizon. And this is just in 2014, so just a few years ago, then said those rules have got to go as long as you're classified that way, then you're going to have to play by these rules.

But that changed, again, in 2014 when Tom Wheeler came along as the chair of the FCC. And he kind of flip flopped. He came out initially and proposed some rules that people said, no, that's way too weak, brah. Right, well, it got leaked. And there was a huge backlash in public outcry against it. But I don't think anyone was surprised,

because Tom Wheeler was a longstanding lobbyist for the cable and wireless industries. So he was an industry insider who was supposed to be regulating that industry that he was already friends with and where his background was. So nobody was really surprised when the FCC came out with these really weakened rules on ISPs. But there was a huge backlash against it.

Yeah, that was the first battle for the net. And then Wheeler went, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. I was just kidding. Here's my real document. He didn't really say that. But he came up with a new document with bigger, sharper teeth. And that was what you referenced earlier, the 400-page document called the 2015 Open Internet Order, which

was a really big deal. That was a surprise, because Wheeler, again, who was a lobbyist for these very industries, not only reversed course from these toothless weak rules to much stronger rules that were in step with what the net neutrality advocates were asking for, he actually went even further and made even stronger, tighter net neutrality rules and then took the time

to write something like 300 pages of rules explaining the logic and the thought behind all this, which could pose a problem, as we'll talk about later, for Ajit Pai and the Trump FCC to get past. But it was a huge, huge surprise that came out of nowhere and an enormous victory for net neutrality advocates. And for Obama and his administration, it became one of the signature acts, I guess,

or watershed moments for the Obama administration, because he campaigned as a net neutrality supporter. And then finally, one year, the last year of his presidency, his FCC just dropped the mic on net neutrality and said, it is done. Yeah, and within that Open Internet Order, one of the first, I mean, it did a couple of big things, but the big, big thing it did was it said, hey,

remember way back in 1934, the Communications Act, we think we can actually reclassify broadband as what we're going to call a Title II telecommunication service. So remember earlier when we said they split it up in the two buckets. This all changed a couple of years ago when they could now classify Verizon or Comcast

as a telecom service, which, again, means it's a common carrier and much more heavily regulated. Yeah, so the FCC was like, oh, we can't tell you what to do if you're classified as an information service. Well, you're no longer classified as that. You're classified as a telecommunication service now, and we are up your rectum.

It's so interesting that this, like, we've seen the birth of this industry that is being figured out in full view, well, maybe not always full view. You know what I'm saying, though? Yeah, and it's still being molded right now. Oh, yeah.

You know? It's really interesting. So that was the first thing that the 2015 Open Internet Order did, right? It reclassified the ISPs back to telecommunication status. It took them out of the same league as YouTube and Netflix and all of these content providers on the web and said, you guys actually handle the nuts

and bolts of it. You don't handle the actual content. So you're telecom now. Then it did a second part, too, which was basically saying the net is now neutral. We're instilling net neutrality values onto the internet as the FCC. Yeah, and we'll do so in three main ways.

No blocking. You can't block lawful content. You can't block services. You can't block applications. As long as it's lawful and legal content, you can't block it. You can't throttle it. To me, throttling is a weird word. It seems counterintuitive.

Because throttling, I would think, means you speed something up. But in this case, it means you can't slow something down. Yeah, basically. I would say breaking. Right? And not throttling. Yeah, laying on top of.

Yeah, but throttling basically means, as an ISP, you can't come in like we were talking about earlier and saying, you know what, you're a competition Netflix to our Comcast services, so we want to make sure no one can stream anything very well. Right. So we're going to slow you down. And then the final one was no paid prioritization, so.

No fast lanes. Yeah, you can't pay someone to juice up your site. Right, so that you can get an edge over the competition, which, I mean, like, if Netflix is doing that to Amazon Prime, nobody's really shedding a tear. Like, Amazon Prime are big kids and they can handle themselves. But if you're developing the next streaming video app and you don't have the money to compete against Netflix,

that's a huge disadvantage and has been pointed out as potentially stifling to new technology. Yeah, for sure. So one of the things that the FCC's 2015 rule said were that ISPs have to behave in a, quote, just in reasonable manner. I think you said that, right? No, I didn't.

OK, well, they do. That's part of it. And they also said, hey, everybody, from YouTube to YouTube, you guys, if you see an ISP behaving in an unjust and unreasonable manner, let us know. Even if it's not illegal, if you think it's unjust and unreasonable, let us know. And we will look into it.

And the ISPs went, oh, god, I hate the FCC. So that was a really big thing. And we'll talk about a little bit more about why it is such a big thing in a minute. But then one of the other things that it did too was it said, this also applies to wireless providers. Before back in 2010, when the FCC introduced some net neutrality rules that were challenged by Verizon in court

and were overturned by the court in 2014, one of the things that they did was it exempted wireless carriers, wireless ISPs, from these laws. Again, because they wanted to promote growth in that industry. They're like, no one's ever going to use their phone to stream content. I think they were hoping that people would. And that regulation might hamper that.

Right. So that kind of brings us up to speed on where we are today. Enter Ajit Pai, who was a former lawyer for Verizon and is the head of the FCC under Trump. And he, like I said before, he favors what he calls a light touch regulation, which is basically pre-title to reclassification.

Right. Basically, if you are an ISP, you are going to be subject to the laws of competition, of capitalism. And those will keep you in line. And the FCC doesn't need to be involved. And the more the FCC is involved, the more stifling these regulations will be.

And basically, the whole internet will break if the FCC is involved. Yeah, in his theory, I watched a couple of interviews with him. And his theory, very smart guy, his theory is that if we deregulate and kind of make it wide open, then people in, I guess, more rural areas of the country will benefit. Because if we have all these regulations,

it might stifle their internet. And we want everyone to have good, fast internet. And he believes that the way forward is through not regulating this stuff. And he thinks that would lead to rural areas getting faster speeds. I don't see how that's possible. Like, I mean, just by definition,

fewer customers out there means it's more expensive to lay that cable out to those people. Well, I think his argument is that investments in this infrastructure would dry up because of these rules, which, in turn, the first people to lose out on that would probably be people in rural areas. Like, we're not going to bother putting infrastructure in these rural areas because it's not

worth our time and effort. I got you. That's what he's saying. So there's actually another thing that addresses that from the old telephone days. I can't remember what it's called. It's like a universal fund. But it's basically where everybody

who has a telephone line or gets service from an ISP paid a little tax. Like, if you looked at your phone bill back in the day, there would be a line item that said, like, the universal something fund. And it was $0.03 or $0.07 or something like that. Something you just couldn't care less about. But put together in a pot with a $0.07

from all the other phone users, households that had phones, you had a pretty decent amount of money. And that money was taken to create infrastructure out to rural areas so that people out in the sticks had telephones. There's a bill right now or a proposal in the FCC that was proposed by the Wheeler FCC about creating that or continuing that same thing

with broadband, right? So I mean, there's a solution right there. It's everybody paying an extra few cents so that people out in rural areas can get that kind of infrastructure. And it's the taxpayers paying the ISPs to go lay that cable for people in rural areas. Yeah, he also says, because one of the things a lot of people

talk about are the harm that can be caused by this deregulation. And there are examples, even, which we'll go over here in a minute, but he calls those hypothesized harms and even said a solution that wouldn't work, title two, is a solution that wouldn't work for a problem that didn't exist. So in this interview I saw on NPR when they sat down

and gave him examples of what can happen. He said, well, this has happened. I'm not saying it hasn't happened. He said, but these are single examples. And he said, to me, it would have to be widespread evidence of this kind of problem in order for this kind of regulation to be enacted. Right, I got you.

Which maybe it would be more widespread if there was no regulation. Well, that's the fear. That's another hypothesis, I guess. That's the fear that once you take the bridle off of the ISPs, they're going to run rampant. And again, these are multinational companies that are providing most of the access to the public internet

in America and the Western world. So it's not foolish to think that they're going to very quickly consolidate as much power as they can with the new less restricted freedom to do so that would be given if you rolled back the 2015 rules. And a lot of people point out, too, that if you look at the period from 1996 to 2005, while the ISPs were classified as telecoms,

the internet still boomed and flourished. We had a bubble. An internet stock bubble happened even pretty early on. And the internet, as we know it today, developed during that time. So the idea that it's stifling or it would stifle that growth classifying ISPs as telecoms doesn't seem to hold much water.

Well, and when you talk about investment infrastructure, it kind of depends on which studies you've looked at. Some have said that it has already. Like Pi pointed to 12, I think over the two-year period since the title II went into effect, the 12 major carriers have had 5% reduction in infrastructure spending. And then you can cherry pick another study that might say,

well, yeah, but these companies actually put in more money and invested more money. So I think in either case, it's probably a correlation and causation argument. Maybe you can't necessarily say it's because of the different classification. Right. And so the numbers we have are not so great that there's

this lobbying group called US Telecom. And their numbers show that the infrastructure investing, this is new fiber cable or upgrades to existing cable being laid in the United States, the broadband infrastructure, that the spending by the big 12 ISPs went down by $1 billion between 2014 and 2015. And the idea is that's because of reclassification. The US Census Bureau said, actually, no.

Our numbers show that between 2014 and 2015, the spending on infrastructure went up by $600 million. Not that much, but it was an actual increase. And this is really, really important, Chuck, because if you are looking at net neutrality in the battle over it from a legal standpoint, infrastructure is going to be the crux of the argument. Because there was a law passed back in 1946.

I can't remember what it's called. But it basically bans federal agencies from making capricious rule changes, which is basically exactly the situation that we're in right now. You have one administration making one set of rules, and then a year or two later, a philosophically different administration coming in and completely changing those rules. Well, to do that, the new administration's regulators

have to prove why it's a good idea to change these rules. They can't just be capricious. And so observers of this whole battle that's going on right now are saying, probably, Pi's going to be using the infrastructure, the drop in infrastructure investing, as his reason why. He's going to point to it and say, look, man, this Title II classification led to a billion dollar,

five billion dollar, whatever billion dollar drop in infrastructure investment. It was a bad idea. We're going to reverse the rules. And if he can do that, then the rules probably will be changed, and net neutrality will be rolled back. But the figures aren't in yet for 2016. So no one actually knows if overall spending on infrastructure

declined or increased or stayed the same. But that's probably going to be the crux of the legal argument about changing the rules back. You want to take a break? Sure. All right. We're going to take a break, and hopefully we'll get to hear Josh say lay the cable at least two more times.

OK? That's why SK. Josh Clark. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s, called David Larsser and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude. Bring you back to the days of slipdresses and choker necklaces.

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Yeah, it's been like a minute or so. So before we move on, we should say that this, like we were saying about websites going dark, the title too is up for grabs again, essentially, coming up soon. And people are being asked, if you care about this one way or the other, you can leave your comments on restoring internet freedom by going to FCC.gov and you click on the file of public comment. And then you click on preceding 17-108, restoring internet freedom. And then you can tell them what you think about it.

And the comments in and of themselves have gotten a lot of traction in popular culture. Back in 2014, John Oliver did a piece on, what's this show called, This Week Tonight? Last week tonight? That's right. Thank you. And he very famously called the battle over net neutrality cable company Smurfery, right? And he basically, he said, everybody go leave your comments about net neutrality and the next day, the FCC's website broke, it buckled under the strain.

And ultimately, the FCC got something like 3.7 million public comments about the 2015 rules, most of them in favor of them, right? So this time around, John Oliver's done another thing, the internet broke again, but they think this time it was actually a DDoS attack, it was an attack. And there's also been evidence that spam bots are leaving comments as well. Yeah, when they're like 5 million identical comments on the- Half a million. Oh, half a million?

Yeah, there's been about 5 million total, but they found like half a million from a spam bot. Right, which were identical comments with, I mean, I think they use real names and addresses. Right. But the comments were all the same. Yeah, one of the persons whose name was stolen and used by the spam bot was a jeep pie himself. Yeah, and this is what it said, it said, the unprecedented regulatory power by the Obama administration imposed on the internet is smothering innovation, damaging the American

economy and obstructing job creation, the plan currently under consideration at the FCC to repeal Obama's title two power grab is a positive step forward and will help to promote a truly free and open internet for everyone. Yeah. So it's just so interesting to me that both sides want the same thing and they just have two very different ideas on how to go about it. Yeah. And someone's right and wrong, right?

Well, I think, you know, what's bizarre about this one, there's three sides to it. There's two sides that are opposed philosophically over the role of government and regulation. And then there's a third side, the ISPs who are like, everybody shut up, stop telling us what to do. We want to just go make some money and we want the FCC out of our butts. Yes. You know? Yeah.

So let's, we've kind of hit on some of them, but let's talk about what some of the arguments in favor of net neutrality are and then we'll talk about some of the arguments against. Well, I guess the first thing that we should point out is that it actually will prevent censorship. Yeah. When that is what it is feared, it won't happen. Yeah. There's, we didn't say that the name that Ajit Pai and his FCC came up with for their

new rules is restoring internet freedom rules, which has kind of been accused of being new speaker, double-speak, because it's basically saying like, you know, the FCC being involved in this was a power grab by the Obama administration and that by getting the FCC out of this whole thing, then we're actually protecting against censorship, that it was a government grab of the internet to try to start to censor it. You're right, which is not the case. Well, I mean, I guess it depends on how you feel about government regulation, but yeah, the saying that the 2015 rules allowed government censorship is, is patently wrong.

Yeah. That's what I meant. I mean, it prevents censorship by the ISPs by preventing blocking and throttling. Yeah. Another thing that some people, it's weird, the arguments and counterarguments all like use each other. They'll say that like, no, we need the regulation so we can promote growth in this industry, not stifle it, but when you have net neutrality in place, it keeps that low barrier to just

getting a website going and like, like you said before, we're at an age now where anyone can design the next Facebook and if, if let's say you needed a half a million dollars, like you've designed it and everything's great, but you need to pay an ISP 500 grand to get it going at a reasonable speed, then that'll, that'll kill innovation. Right. I guess it depends on whose innovation you're stifling. If you're looking at the ISPs as part of the internet, well, then having the internet thrive and having new, new, huge, massive traffic driving companies like Facebook that get a

lot of people to the internet to use it in the first place, that's an inherent good. But really what you're talking about is, is keeping that unregulated and regulating the ISPs. So, I mean, what are you stifling? And the argument is that you're stifling infrastructure investment, so like high speed cable being laid by, not by me, and then, you know, getting cable out to rural areas, that kind of thing. I think when you, when you hear both sides using the same point to prove their case, it means that BS is a foot somewhere.

Another thing that we touched on a little bit is like when we said, hey, maybe Comcast is a cable company would want to slow down or throttle Netflix. So, you know, it would not unlevel the playing field. The same can be said of like a telephone company not wanting Skype to become a thing or internet phone to become a thing. And so that is a genuine fear that behind the scenes, there will be throttling going on. And that's a real legitimate fear for two reasons, Chuck, one, that it's the ISPs are

starting to branch out and getting into, like you said earlier, the, the content game. Yeah, the content game, right? So, so that's, that's rule one or that's, that's problem one, like for, for, for instance, Verizon just bought Yahoo and Yahoo owns Flickr and Tumblr. And Tumblr, by the way, used to be at the, at the forefront, the tip of the spear for net neutrality advocacy, like they were loud and proud, man. And then Verizon bought them and all of a sudden Tumblr silent on the subject, right? But more to the point, since Verizon bought Yahoo, which owns Flickr and Tumblr, it told

all of its Tumblr and Flickr users that have a Bell South associate or a AT&T associated email address that they weren't going to be able to access their Flickr or Tumblr accounts anymore until they created a new user ID with a, using a Yahoo email address. So that's fairly anti competitive. You can make a case. And so that's going on right now as ISPs are starting to get into the, the media game, but it's also happened in the past plenty of times too. It's already happened.

It's been documented that when the ISPs are free to, to be anti competitive, they take you up on the offer. Yeah. And again, Pi has responded to those incidences, isolated examples, and not enough of a reason to regulate. Yeah. His feeling is it, it has to be a widespread problem for it to be a real issue. Yeah.

I mean, I guess that's a position for sure. That's a position. Yeah. Yeah. What about the case against net neutrality? So again, there's, there's, there's that whole investment thing in infrastructure, which is, that's big. That's legitimate.

Sure. I mean, like if, if the ISPs say, dude, it's just, we're not making enough money. We're not, we're, we're really unhappy about this regulation. We're, we're going to stop putting money into the American broadband infrastructure. Then America will suffer as a result. We want the highest, fastest speed infrastructure we can get. And we rely on the ISPs to build those and then charge us money for access using those high speed routes.

Right? Because they want, they want the fastest internet because they want your business. They totally do. Right? Okay. And here's the thing, like then everybody when they're talking about this seems to kind of dance around this, but yeah, dude, the ISPs can make a lot of money charging access. They make plenty of money, plenty of revenue, but they're also, again, they're the gatekeepers.

They, they're the ones who built this infrastructure. They're the ones who have this, the access to this, these networks built and these, these customer bases built. And if they are unhappy and they want to be sour pusses about it, they can stop investing in America's infrastructure and America will suffer as a result. And again, these aren't necessarily companies that have an office on Main Street in Kansas in Topeka. They're multinational companies.

And if they move their favor elsewhere, then America could suffer. Right? And there were somewhat hostages to their, their whims to an extent, but at the end of the day, America is also one of the best markets for broadband access and they want the money of American users. So they are going to keep investing in infrastructure, I think, but it's a gamble. And if you're, if you're opposed to federal regulation in principle, you're going to say that gamble is not worth it.

Like I don't want to put federal regulation on these guys if it's going to make them unhappy because I don't like federal regulation. They don't like federal regulation. And it could take them off enough that America's infrastructure could start to sag. Here's the thing though. And I don't know much, I'm not an expert in this, but my feeling is, wouldn't they have to all collude and none of them do that? Because as soon as one of them starts, uh, one of them starts laying the cable like

Josh Clark, then they'll have the advantage and the other ones be like, we got to start laying the cable because they're getting ahead and getting faster. Well, yeah. Like they would all have to be in cahoots and say, well, hey, let's all just sort of make a ton of money and just say this is how fast the internet is now. So here you just dug up another issue. It's totally true if you have a lot of different ISPs who have large, massive networks. If you have those large ISPs suddenly starting to consolidate, which they are, and you have

fewer and fewer, but bigger and bigger ISPs, they control larger parts of the market to where if you've got basically two major ISPs competing against one another, they could conceivably do that. And it would be tough for one to just be like, no, I'm not doing that. I'm laying all the cable. I'm going to take all your, your market share. It's possible that they could do that, but it could also be likely that they would collude not necessarily in an illegal fashion, but just saying, you know what, we both kind of

agree America's the pits right now. We'll wait until the winds change. Let's go over to Ireland and invest in their infrastructure because they got some cash and they don't feel like, like regulating today. Right. Good old Ireland. So it's not like, you know, I think a lot of people think like, well, you know, this is Trump's FCC, so they're just, you know, automatically evil and have no real point.

There are, they do represent a viewpoint of anti-regulation sentiment, right? Right. But there's, there's, there's another aspect to all of this, Chuck, that has kind of blown my mind that it's just not talked about all that much. Yeah. One of the, well, two of the things that, that people who are in the net neutrality debate are talking about and worried about are don't really actually exist any longer. Yeah.

Two major things. Yeah. So internet censorship and a equal access to broadband networks, that, that's not around anymore. Neither of those are around or an internet free from censorship, I should say. Yeah. I mean, I don't know if censorship is the right word, because that implies you have no access at all.

But what search engines do and what apps do and what Facebook and Google and YouTube and everyone does in that game is they serve things up to the public that are very much curated according to their needs, I was going to say whims, but they're not whims, their needs as a company. So it's not like they're censoring things, but they certainly aren't, I mean, like you can still find the things on the internet. They're not like deleting things and censoring things, but they're definitely serving up, like search engines aren't, you know, they're definitely all just, they're serving up what

they want to serve up because that serves their company best. Yeah. Whether it's, yeah. It's like, you know, content that's more likely to lead to data that they can use to better target you for ads, or there are some instances of very, like actual censorship where Twitter can take your tweet down if it's deemed offensive. That's censorship. Facebook can do the same thing with your posts.

That's censorship. So there is a whole group of stakeholders in this whole debate, the media companies that do have the legal and technical ability to censor the internet, right? But giving the ISPs the ability to censor the internet doesn't make anything any fairer or more even. It just makes things worse, right? So that's the idea that, oh, well, these guys can already censor the internet. So why shouldn't the ISPs be able to?

That's a terrible argument. Yeah. And one of the other big things that's already happening is when we were talking about paying extra money to get your content faster, that's already going on. Right. So there are already fast lanes, essentially. Yes. Exactly.

And that's not supposed to be, but it's been going on for a while. Yeah. And so Google and Netflix, among other companies, have basically have paid extra money to connect. They've almost created, like, a side internet by connecting their routers and servers directly to the ISPs network servers instead of saying, well, we'll just be routing our traffic along with the rest of the internet. They have essentially paid to have their own special fast lane. Right.

Exactly. And again, this has been going on for years, and Google started it. And we all love it. Basically, everybody has, yeah. Yeah. That's the rub. There was a very famous dispute about it that made this whole concept. It's called Peering made it public between Comcast and Verizon and Netflix.

Netflix is users. And I remember this. Netflix was, their transmission was degrading fast. And Netflix had to go to Verizon and Comcast and say, I need a peer network set up. I need to be able to plug in directly. Here's a bunch of money. I hate you guys. And they publicly accused at least Comcast, I think, of purposefully letting their traffic

back up and not rerouting it to make it go faster. So that Comcast would have to come and give them money. And now Verizon and Comcast's viewpoint is, well, you guys are sending tons of traffic that you're charging for our way without paying anything extra. Why should we have to add an extra router or server or whatever to accommodate this traffic when you guys are the ones generating it and profiting from it? And so that's just kind of been like a, I mean, that's the part of that philosophical divide too with net neutrality.

Who should be paying for the increase in traffic? Well, not only that, but these deals are worked out between the companies. And if the FCC sticks their nose in it, then all of a sudden, they are inserting their self in that process. And companies aren't liking the sounds of that either. Well, yeah, like the market for this has been unregulated and for the most part, companies have been okay with it and fine with it and the ISPs are happy because their users are getting faster traffic and Netflix or say Amazon Prime is happy because their users

are getting to watch Game of Thrones faster, right? But the FCC's 2015 rules say, well, we're involved in this now. And remember, we said that ISPs have to act in a just and reasonable manner. So Netflix now under these 2015 rules, if they try this again, you can come and tell us that they're acting unreasonably and we'll get involved, which is another thing that Ajit Pai wants to roll back because he doesn't think the FCC has any business getting involved in these transactions. Yeah.

It's, man, it's really a slippery slope on all sides, if you ask me. For sure. But to me, the whole thing boils down to do we want to give ISPs the ability, the freedom to block traffic? I think of them as the switchboard operators. I think conceiving of them as common carriers is absolutely right. And I think giving them the ability to censor or block or throttle traffic, I just think it's a bad move.

Well, I mean, one thing that has kind of been true over and over throughout our history is that greed has typically wins out when it's completely unregulated and it has led to bad things for the end user, whatever industry that might be. The companies might win out, but greed kind of doesn't lead down the good path for average Joe sitting at his laptop. I think that's true, man. And that is what it boils down to, do we trust them, do we trust them to act fairly? Yeah.

Well done. If you want to know more about net neutrality, well, you can get involved and then you can also head on over to FCC.gov and they also allow comments from international people too. You don't have to be an American, but you should check a box that says you're international. You just put your name and address on there and leave your comment and you can comment. Remember, you can do that till July, what, 17th Chuck? Yeah, I think. And then there's comments on the comments that run till August 16th, so go let them

know how you feel one way or the other. And since I said feel, it's time for listener mail. Yeah, click on the international box so it will go right into the abyss of the internet. I'm just kidding. I'm going to call this just a very concise stonewall reaction. We've got a lot of good feedback on our Remembering Stonewall episode and I think both of us feel pretty good about that one. Great even.

Hey guys, I've listened to and loved your podcast for years, but your recent Remembering Stonewall episode compelled me to write you guys. As a gay man, I thought, how can these two straight guys do justice to my community's history? I'm not prejudiced subsequently, I'm not proud of, because you handle the subject so eloquently, so understandingly. Very impressed on how well you tackle the subject guys, which shouldn't have surprised me since you handle every episode so expertly, but since the subject hits so close to home

for me, I was so very happy and proud with the reverence that you gave it. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Nice. That's three thank yous. Yeah, three thank yous is, that's the magic number. And that is from Craig. Craig, thanks a lot for that. We appreciate it.

We do feel pretty good about that episode. It was interesting and good and stirring and all that jazz. So hats off to you right back. If you want to get in touch with us like Craig did, you can tweet to us at joshumclark or syskpodcast. You can join us on Facebook at facebook.com slash stuff you should know or slash Charles W. Chuck Bryant. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast at howstuffworks.com.

And as always, join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it. And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never

ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts.