The Vergecast - Net Neutrality 2017 Thanksgiving madness

Episode Date: November 27, 2017

The FCC decided to bury the news about its plan to end the Net Neutrality rules in the middle of Thanksgiving week here in the US. But that won't stop Nilay, Paul, and Dieter from doing a Vergecast.  This was originally broadcasted live on YouTube on November 24th, 2017. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the verge.biz. But here's what I'm going to tell you. This is a completely renegade episode of the Vergecast. Our producer, Andrew Marino, is not here. We are live, foolishly, on Hangouts on YouTube, which may or may not be working. And there's a live audience here chatting at us. But I am at my parents' house in Wisconsin. Hi.

Dieter, where are you? I'm in a little town called Magnolia, Arkansas, which is a lovely town, and it has meh-eh internet. Interestingly enough, I think it's the only internet option here is this me-e-internet. Yeah, that's about right. I also have meh internet. That's the only option at my parents' house here in Racine, Wisconsin. Paul, where are you?

I'm at the New York office, and I'm literally the only person here other than some guy who's going around and cleaning stuff. How's the internet in the office? Well, that's exactly why I'm here. When I am at home, I think my router is misconfigured, and whenever, especially Google Hangouts is the worst. It just chokes and it just sits there and it doesn't work for a little while. So as you might be guessing, as you may have surmised from our internet banter, we're here emergency renegade broadcast for one reason, which is that the home pod has been delayed. Yeah.

And none of us know what. That's not. We're bereft. we're a home pod. Wait, wait, no, I got one right here. I got one. I have like a 2004 product called HomePod by a company called Mac Since. It's basically a home pod.

It's like an internet radio. All right, all right. Paul, put the HomePod down. No one wants your 2004 internet radio here. All right. But here's why we're actually doing it. On Wednesday, which is the day before Thanksgiving, we're recording this on the blackest of Black Fridays. On Wednesday, Ajit Pai and the FCC put out their proposed order to completely rescind all net neutrality rules in the United States.

So Tom Wheeler, the former chairman of the FCC, in 2015, reclassified internet service, broadband service is a Title II common carrier service, which let him put rules on it, like no blocking, no locking, no locking, no paid prioritization, no throttling, transparency rules. A jeep pie and their Republicans thought this was a terrible idea. They thought it would reduce broadband investment. Pie has been... And the Republican? Oh, yeah, yeah. Okay, I'm with you. I'm with you. He's a Republican. What are you going to do? Pie became the chairman of the FCC when Trump became president. He has spent, I would say, the past year, making his case that investment has been lowered. He has not, and I think this is an important point, he has not taken a, any interviews with anyone who disagrees with him. He's only insisted that he's right. I think

this is a point I want to come back to a whole lot as we talk about this on this firstcast. And he put out his notice to proposed rulemaking a few months ago, which we read and reacted to. And he put out his proposed order on Wednesday. There's going to be a vote. He's pushing a vote on December 14th. So there's he's he's all about like look I put out the rules before you know the public gets to see them. That's not what Tom Wheeler did. But he put them out the day before Thanksgiving. And he's holding a vote in two weeks. So it's like six of one half of the other. Right. Yeah. People are mad. I'm mad. Deider, I think you're mad. Paul probably not so mad. I'm pretty mad. I'm glad. I'm glad. Paul's glad. But people are right now today protesting at Verizon stores. They spent all day yesterday protesting. There

there are the battle for the net.com is running huge call-in campaigns. We're writing posts in the site. And because we talk about the Verge cast so much, Paul said to me and Dieter, why don't we have an emergency rogue session? So everyone else is on vacation, except for the poor people covering Black Friday deals in the Verge. And we are basically at our parents' houses, except for Paul who's in the office. The verge is my parent. Doing an emergency session. So here's what I will start with. I think this is the important thing. I want to point out that Nilai's lightning fast overview elides over like a million points that we would have previously spent the entire Verge cast on.

Yeah. Like a million points. There's just so much history and pain and sorrow and like actually very interesting, like, debates that we have had that are embedded in that little story that Nilai told. And so, like, if you, like, see us, like, pause and, like, have a well of, feelings during this podcast. It's because like, oh, man, you just said that thing. I could talk for an hour about that, but I have to shut up now. So I just want to point that out. There's a lot. So I think there's, I mean, this is just long history. This is, uh, you know, in 21. I'll start

with the main thing. Let's start with the railroads. Do it start with the railroad? No, the, the, the main thing is we now have a document from Pye, a legal document in which he makes his legal argument. And it's so we don't have to have, like, a moral debate about this, right? We're not having a, how do we think the internet should be regulated? We have, guess what we're going to have? I know. But there's like a foundation under it, and there's an argument under it that we can,

I can at least refer to because I've opened it. I'll slack it to you guys so you can see it. I realize it's a good idea. But it's here. I can just read you. There's like a summary. Over the top, right? So it says, this is the fact sheet. Docket number 17-108. Over 20 years ago, President Clinton and Republican Congress established the policy of the United States to preserve the vibrant and competitive free market that presently exists for the internet, unfettered by state or regulation. Federal, state regulation. That's great. That's a great line. And then it's, you know, it goes on to say, this declaratory ruling report and order would return to the bipartisan consensus on light-touch regulation, ending utility-style regulation of the internet, promote future innovation and investment. And more investment in digital infrastructure will create jobs, increase competition, and lead to better, faster, cheaper, internet access for all Americans, especially those in rural and low-income areas.

So that's, okay, right? Like, that is Pai's, like, moral argument. And then he's got all the stuff he wants to do. So the stuff he wants to do, he wants to restore the classification of broadband internet access service is an information service, which is, it's a lot. Yeah. Okay. What's happening? I just, I just breathing.

Just like, just taking it, cave in a couple deep breaths. Yeah. He wants to reinstate the private mobile service classification of mobile broadband internet access service. This is, this one, these two work together in a particularly hilarious legal way. So I'm just, I'm just going to explain the information service thing. So right now, the internet under net neutrality is classifies as a telecommunication service because the definition of that is, A telecommunication service provides point-to-point connections without any additional layers over the top. An information service, which is what the courts and the FCC called the internet before, is like you get additional things.

So like think about America Online in the 90s. You would dial into America Online. It would present you an interface. That interface would have lots of bits and pieces, like an email client and forums and like, AOL shopping or whatever, and then you could take a right turn out of that interface onto the main internet. That's an information service. Does that have anything to do with the common carrier designation? So if as an information service, it's title one, which is not a common carrier. As a telecommunication service, it's title two, which makes it a common carrier. So they're saying

America Online under that definition in like in that way of AOL where you would dial into an AOL server and then it would like mediate everything and present you with applications and whatever is an information service. And what I have always thought of is broadband, which is I have a cable mode and I plug my Wi-Fi router into it and I just use a web browser. That has been classified as a telecommunication service for the past two years. Pai is now classifying that is an information service. And his argument for that, his legal argument for that is based on the fact that internet service providers, this is true. This is his argument. They provide DNS servers in caching equipment.

And that is equivalent to AOL's like AOL chat in like user groups and AOL shopping. Like I'm not kidding. That's his argument that those things are information services that mediate your internet experience. And it, you know, you also get, you might get an email client from your broadband provider or you might get like a custom web browser or any of the other garbage that you don't actually want. And because of that, it's an information service. This is literally his argument in this document. I mean, if I wanted to actually start an information, like a more modern equivalent, not AOL might be what, like the Bloomberg terminal?

Like that, to me, sounds like an information service. You are free to do whatever the hell you want on that information service. So I want to pay you to get access to the news that you provide in the terminal. I will just do it. Everything will be fine. But nobody does that on the internet. And so this idea that was DNS and caching counts as the information service, it's like, no, no, it doesn't, right? Like, I'm trying to approach the argument on like his terms.

If he's setting the rules of the debate and the rules are that counts as a, you know, bespoke, I am directly giving you a thing information service and not a telecommunication service. I don't know Like that's Like they That seems odd to me That seems like It seems like a fig leaf It seems like not true at all

Right But if we are going to accept the argument On his terms Like play devil's advocate And make the case to me That a caching server is equivalent To AOL online or copy serve Or the Bloomberg terminal

Or whatever So that 100% the argument And so like When I say like There's a document here That we can refer to the argument you just made is referred to in the document.

Right? I mean, this was an argument that happened. There was a court case called Brand X. And Brand X argued that it was an information service and the FCC already it wasn't, Brand X1. All that's fine. But the point here is paragraph 29.

We begin by evaluating the information service definition and conclude that it encompasses broadband internet access service. Of course you do. Yeah. But the commissioners looked to dictionary definitions and found the term capability to be broad and expansive, including the potential ability and the capacity to be used treated and developed for a particular surface. Because- Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. They pulled high school freshman, like, term paper shit on this thing.

Sure did. We looked it up at the dictionary. Sure did. Because broadband internet access service necessarily has the capacity or potential ability to be used to engage in the access, in the access, in the ITE's. within the information service definition, which are generating, acquiring, storing, transforming, processing, retrieving, utilizing, or making available information via telecommunications, we conclude it is best understood to have those capabilities. So this is about as wacky of a legal argument as it gets, right? They have this word. They can define the word, as they're saying, as expansively as they want.

it has nothing to do with your experience using the internet. They've just defined it as can you generate acquire store, transform, process, retrieve, utilize, or make available information via telecommunications. Well, that's an information service. So we'll just stick broadband internet under that. And the, you know, they go on to say the record reflects of the fundamental purposes of broadband internet access service are for generating and making available information. For example, through social media and file sharing, which is not. what you do with what you get from your internet service provider, but that's what they're saying you do. So that's the first piece. It's the, it is the foundation upon which this entire argument

rests. Is the internet a telecommunication service, broadband internet access from your provider? Is it a telecommunication service or an information service? And all the stuff that we will talk about competition and whether you have one provider or two, all of that comes down to what do we do once we, how do we define it once we know what competition is like? Does that make any sense? Yeah, absolutely. One of his, one of Pye's points is that this is how broadband providers were originally classified. So, 2015 was the anomaly to move it to telecommunications and we're just reverting back to what the internet always was. So that is, that, that is his argument, but it is not, I don't think it's backed up. Because for the longest time, the way people got on the internet was with dial-up modems.

And so you have to do the mental exercise of separating out the phone line, which was always a title to common carrier service. So your phone company could not restrict or throttle whatever was happening on your phone line. And then you had ISPs. So here in literally my parents' house, which is the first place ever got on the internet. Our phone company at that time was called Ameritech. You might guess that it is now part of AT&T, as all things inevitably are. But our phone company at that time was called Ameritech.

I had, there was like 15 different little ISPs in Racine, Wisconsin. I actually worked at one of them. It was called core.net. I was like in middle school. And my job was to go and reset the Supra v.92 modems every day because they would all crash. So I would walk into a room and, like, reset 200 modems.

That was one competitor. You could get internet access by calling Ameritech's bank of modems. You could call AOL's bank of modems. You could call Prodigies Bank of Modems. And Ameritech running the line couldn't stop you. They couldn't say you can only call Ameritech to get internet access. So that allowed competition to flourish because Ameritech, which controlled the Title II phone line, wasn't allowed to tell you who you could call.

Simple. So there was like this huge range of ISP providers. The ASP providers at that time the internet was new. They were running dial-up modem. They were doing all kinds of stuff to make the internet work better. And they were competing. And the FCC was like, we're going to leave that alone. Because fundamentally, it's Title II on the phone line. Does that make any sense, Paul? So like there's an argument to be had about when the information service classification showed up. And the opposition to Pi would say it showed up with the brand. end X case when the, when the court made an affirmative decision that the internet was Title I. Right. So there's this weird period where like, you know, net neutrality proponents say we got it wrong, right? And so then we fixed it because the early part of the internet that everyone talks about where it was like this explosion of providers and service and there was like free internet providers that showed you ads and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. The backbone of that was Title II phone lines. And so now I think you can get to a place where you say, okay, well, the backbone, because I didn't have a lot of phone company providers, the backbone of that is now broadband providers because I only have one broadband provider in this house in Wisconsin, and I should be able to go to all these other competing services on it. But you can't do that.

Like, that's the thing is when you had a bunch of different ISPs all going over the phone line, you could pick one. And we don't have that now. And so we have to, you know, the provider and the service provider are collapsed to the same thing, the broadband provider. It's like look at cell service in like the UK. Like you can pick from a bunch of different providers, but they all kind of use the same backhaul as my understanding. It's all like you can switch, right? Oh, if you want to go down that rabbit hole. So in many, well, I've been ready to talk about this for two days.

So in like many European countries, the UK. is one. I think the Netherlands is another. They have what's called local loop unbundling, which is super boring. But there's one set of fiber to everybody's home, and anybody can lease that fiber and start an internet company because there's tons of capacity. So people in the UK can generally pick between like 45 broadband providers. In some countries in Europe, there's no, there's not like a lot of, you know, the EU has net neutrality rules, but the countries themselves allow different things to happen because you have. so many providers to choose from that you can switch.

And that's where the competition piece of this comes in. You have a ton of like you have Earthlinks and AOLs. You have all the ISPs like you had in the dial-up days. But you have a government granted monopoly or government-owned infrastructure. Yeah. So like BT generally owns the fiber. I'm not completely up to date on how it works in the UK. I thought we were a great.

read that like the Ma Bell era where AT&T had a legal government-granted monopoly on telecommunications infrastructure was like a bad phase and we're glad we're over it. So, uh-huh. Right. So. Yeah. So we've arrived at a place where we still have government-granted monopolies, right? We, the, I think that the local loop unbundling piece that a lot of European countries do is a

recognition of the fact that digging a hole in the ground is hard. Right. And you should probably only dig a hole and put an infinite capacity fiber line down once. Right. So yes, the United States has philosophically chosen what they call facilities-based competition. I mean, this is like just nerdery at its finest. Right. Explain facilities-based competition. I haven't heard that term. Oh, God. Okay. So the best example of this is 3G standards, which is if you remember them, the UK used UMTS. They, used GSM for 3G. And the United States, Verizon used CDMA. Sprint was like, fuck it, YMAX, and LTE

was like, we're going to use... Yeah, Sprint was also CDMA, but then, yeah. So we decided that we would allow all these providers to do what, to basically not have standards. Right, we're going to allow different kinds of competition. And in some cases, that works. So the one competition that you could have back then

was Ameritech Grand Copper Wild to your house to get phone service MCI was doing microwave transition uh transmission so i don't remember what MCI stands for completely but it used to be like microwave communications infrastructure whatever and that was sprint used to do a thing and you know they had HD voice so like the idea was the physical infrastructure would be competitive and provide a different kind of end user service to you and so the united states is like built on that model the europeans generally have said, what if we had a giant government, like a meta government? And like, we pick standards for competitors. So like, this is why in Europe, you can buy any phone you want, put any

SIM card in it you want. Everybody uses GSM. You have like different kinds of competition. But there's not there's not, there's not YMAX versus LTE or whatever. Everyone just has to use LTE. So like, we got to get out. We got to get out of these weeds. But it's, these are the weeds. This is what I mean. Like, these are the deep, deep weeds. And that, The deepest weed of this is that a Jeep Pi is saying, because your internet service provider, when you access the internet through your broadband modem, provides DNS and caching, it is providing an information service. And if it supplies anything else to you, if it applies a Comcast.net email service, it is

definitely not a telecommunications. Maybe we can move to an adjacent weed with this. one thing that has been kind of a big controversy in this whole debate, and I'm not really sure where we're at with it, is peering, like paid peering. So something like an ISP, like Time Warner, cable. Is that still a company? I don't even know. It's not. It's called Spectrum now. Spectrum. So Spectrum can say Netflix, hey, you can host your movies in our data center, you know, and you can just link right into our customers, and you don't have to go over, you know, regular pipes to get to our customers. You can just, get straight to them and just pay us pay us some money right so that is again i think where i keep coming back to is the consumer experience right that's basically what we cover it's basically who we talk to hopefully that's who's in the chat right the consumer experience of the internet is that you have one provider or two potentially that take like 86% of americans only have two providers and you get what you get and it's really hard to switch away then there's the

backhaul portion of the internet where Netflix is like making deals for data centers or like network companies like level three are making deals with other network companies like Comcast to like trade traffic back and forth. That originally was not what you're talking about paid peering was originally not in like the net neutrality order. It was all about the consumer line. The FCC put it part of it in a net neutrality order and that was a big win for Netflix but it's not I don't think that's what people are mad about. I don't think people give a shit about paid peering arrangements on the backhaul part of the network. I think they care about the fact that they don't have many choices for internet access.

And if their ISP does something stupid, they have very little recourse. And the recourse most people would want is not to file a lawsuit, which is what Pai is saying you can do, but they want to switch providers to somebody else. Let me back up just a minute. So, like, we can talk about the peering stuff. We can talk about whether or not DNS and caching counts as an information service. But, like, I don't, I hear these legalistic arguments and I don't feel like they're being made in good faith. Like, do you really think that, like, Ajipai and his fellow FCC commissioners are sitting and, you know, getting high and talking about the philosophy of what's a difference between this and that? Or is it what I actually think is happening is he wants to do this thing and he's finding, you know, a legal reason to do this thing.

and he's finding, you know, a legal reason to do the thing that he wants to do. But isn't that what happened in the first place? No. Well, so hang on. Let me, let me, that's possibly true. But this is the thing I was tweeting about the other day. Why does he want to do the thing is the question? Like the philosophical argument that I think like we've had before, Paul said we want to try and avoid.

I don't think we can. is whatever we decide we want to do to run the internet the best way possible. We're going to find a legal fiction to make that possible. We're going to look up a definition of the dictionary, find a word in that definition to make it the thing. Fine.

But why is pulling these regulations away the thing that is so important for him to do? And I genuinely truly want to hear the freshman dorm room explanation of why these net neutrality regulations, regulations actually hurt innovation because the explanations I've heard, regulation bad, like, okay, it actually hampers investment and innovation. I kind of don't believe that, and I don't think there's good evidence for that. I feel like there's another reason, and I don't want to go full,

you know, anti-corporate conspiracy and say it's just about Variety's profits, but I feel like that might be on the table, but there's got to be another reason I'm not thinking of because I'm dumb to justify this thing. And then later on, towards the end of this, we need to talk about the definition of arbitrary and capricious. But let's step out and be like, why? Just why? So, Paul, I'm sure you have an answer,

but I'll give it a very simple one. I can't look into Ajit Pai's heart. I can't. I mean, you could get yourself a chest saw. Wow. Someone's been in Arkansas too long. I can't look in the man's heart. But what he says is that since the net neutrality rules are passed, overall investment

in broadband infrastructure is down. And so if you take the rules away and the rules are costly or whatever, the investment will go back up. And what you want is more investment in broadband infrastructure because everyone has infrastructure investment. That's his argument. Now, there's a lot of argument about whether his numbers are right, just a lot of argument. And one of the main things to argue with is AT&T is so huge, they tip the scale.

So AT&T finished its LTE rollout. It finished a huge network investment. It bought DirecTV for one period of time. It paused investment on its network. And so over the period that Pye is claiming, AT&T alone is enough to say over the year ago period, broadband investment has fallen $200 million. But that's just AT&T. Every other company is out there saying,

we're going to keep investing in our network. So you can look at the total, you can slice it, you can have all kinds of fights, but that's like the main argument over his metric. I'm sure you have another answer. Yeah, and his Wall Street Journal piece, he said that growth had slowed.

It wasn't, and it's not like net down, but it's seems... Well, it's net down if you count AT&T, and the reason you count eight, right, it's net down if AT&T is allowed to say, we brought DirecTV and hit and hit pause on infrastructure. So here's my freshman dorm. I didn't go to college.

So most of my conversations are just freshman dorm conversations that I'm not aware of. If you think of what the FCC was like originally, it's like the U.S. government is going to own the airwaves and lease them to companies. The airwaves are going to be private or a public good. And therefore, no company will be allowed to own. them we will leave yeah i would i would i would say that like the fun the fundamental like debate that we'll have with that that start the start of this explanation is uh whether or not the u.s government is an effective proxy for the people like the people own the airwaves the u.s government

regulate manages them for the people but the the people don't own google the people don't own twitter that's correct that's correct so so so you have the airwaves but this the fc see making all the pipes dug underground a public good is in a sense almost like asset seizure. It's the government saying that because this is so important to people, and obviously the internet is very important for people, and it is a good for people, it now needs to be a public good so that we can make rules for it. And I honestly, it's just a very baseline life, liberty, property kind of thing. I think that is the government overstepping its role. And I think it's the FCC overstepping the role that was assigned to it by Congress. And, you know, Adjipai, a lot of, was always talking about the FEC or sorry, the FTC, like they can manage this. If there's an

anti-competitive practice of one of these companies, we have agencies for that to solve that. But we shouldn't protect internet companies from monopoly status and then make a bunch of rules that actually manage how they're allowed to implement their property. Right. So Paul, real quick, it sounds like the end of that argument is you don't think that back in the day the FCC should have even like regulated head title two in the first place. Like it should not have regulated telephone lines and, you know, kept, you know, ATT from like, you know, blocking me from calling you and changing prices and like the kind of stuff that they wanted phone company stuff to. I don't think the government should be in the role of protecting monopoly.

Like if you, when monopolies really hurt consumers, it's when the government is propping them up. And I think that's what happened with AT&T. And even like with the train, the whole common carrier concept for trains, it was, it's just very unimaginative. It didn't imagine a world where maybe trucks would also deliver goods. And trains would almost be, you know, bit of an afterthought. Right. I think the philosophical debate you're having there is how much does the government assume the future will be better if the market is left to operate,

right? Like, digging a hole in the ground is difficult. Like, it's just a hard thing to do. So the easiest way to dig a hole in the ground is to connect to everybody is to do it on public streets. So the government does own the streets. And you can say, okay, you have access along the street to dig a hole. And the main thing they did, Paul, and I agree with you, this is this is the heart of the problem is they granted monopolies to some companies to put pipes in the streets. So in Philadelphia, Comcast sued the government for providing public Wi-Fi and killed public Wi-Fi because they didn't want competition with Comcast. And the government sort of like let that happen and let it die. But the ability for a competitor to come in and put another private pipe in the ground is restricted just by reality.

That's an enormously costly thing to do. It's restricted by throughout the country all of these restrictive agreements that local governments have entered into with private enterprise for short term capital. So your little, I have a house in upstate New York, like mid-Hudson cable in upstate New York, like has the deal with the county government to provide internet access. There is just not enough like market saturation up there. for another competitor to come in. It's just never going to happen. And like, you can tell me if 5G wireless will come in one day, but like I can't get a 3G signal.

So like the ability for in some of these places for that competition to happen is very low. And I think you have to just decide how either pragmatic you are or how idealistic you are when it comes to, is, are these pipes in the ground part of a public infrastructure that we all rely on or are they absolutely private property that we can't touch. And the phone company example,

the reason AT&T was granted that monopoly is because the government decided the better outcome was for everyone in America to have a phone connection. The other thing I'll point out with the train common carrier thing, it's like, you're not wrong.

Yes, the government is bad at forecasting future disruptive innovations. However, it's a very complicated story because with trains in particular, they got out-innovated by trucks, you'd say, but that was only possible because the government built the national highway system. It's always like this interplay between like what the government as essentially the voice of the people is doing to try and like create the greatest public good

and balance that against personal freedom and like like, you know, the invisible hand of the capitalism is always more complicated than it seems strictly in principle because the things that cause that disruptive innovation are often also the result of government action. One might suggest that the internet itself is the result of, you know, DARPA and DARPNet, and ARPANET, which was government funded. So like, it's always more complicated. Like, the reason that, like, I don't find the regulation bad argument compelling is I feel like it doesn't address the realities of, like, what the actual market is doing. Well, I think it just comes down to common sense. And I want to switch to one thing, but Paul, I think it comes down to, we have these laws in the book. The FCC is not writing laws. It's deciding which of these two regulatory schemes we should use for the internet. Congress could write a law if you believe that this Congress

can do anything, but Congress could write a law. It has two schemes. In 2015, it picked one scheme to broad public acclaim. The FCC is supposed to work in the public interest. A lot of people supported that scheme. Only big internet companies didn't support. that scheme. Right? So only Verizon and AT&T were making the argument that they shouldn't be regulated. And they're out there, you know, Comcast is like tweeting crazy things today. Like, we'll never block anything.

We don't, these rules, don't worry. We're going to follow them anyway because we love you. Like, fine, right. So the best, the best commentary I saw on that, by the way, was Comcast also promises to be at your house between one and five. So like, right, like, so that the internet companies know what the public wants, right? There's just no market force. If Comcast decides to break all of its promises, it's very hard for a lot of people to leave Comcast.

By the way, disclosure, Comcast through its NBC unit owns a minority stake in box media, which owns the verge. There's your disclosure. So that's like, Paul, I think that's the problem. You can have competition. This is Craig Aaron from Free Press told me this. In 2014, it's a quote in a piece I wrote. You can have competition or you can have regulation. Comcast is trying to have neither.

Right? So it does a lot of lobbying work to make sure it's the exclusive internet provider in the markets it's in, and it's doing a lot of lobbying work to say, we shouldn't be regulated. You can't have both. You've got to have both. Absolutely dislike the lobbying against competition. And that's one of the reasons why it terrifies me that the FCC has this much power. Because let's say the roles were reversed, right? Let's say the status quo was the 2015. internet, like the internet had been classified under Title II this whole time, and then 2015 comes along, or let's say 2017 right now. You've got a president who was, you know, elected but didn't win the popular vote. He nominates one person who was already on this commission to be the leader of this commission. And now the whole internet changes. And that's why I think, I understand that the Congress makes a law and then you get a regulatory agency to sort of enact that role that the Congress created for it. But this is basically one person being the deciding vote of what billion dollar companies and billions of dollars worth of infrastructure, how that's actually

used. Like if somebody, if somebody like showed up in some regulatory agency and said, you need to like go home and deflate all your footballs and basketballs for some reason. It's like, well, that's my property. Like, I understand that you made a law, and then there's an agency, and then there's this guy who drinks coffee out of a Reese's mug, thinks I should deflate all. But it's like, I own those. I can decide how I want to use it.

Yeah, but I can make those laws all day long, Paul. I can tell you how fast to drive your car. I can tell you if you want to, I'm in Wisconsin, so I've seen a lot of these folks around. If you want to go hunting, you got to wear blaze orange, right? Like, if you build a house, it's got to be up to these. codes. Like, we make those rules all of the time, literally all of the time. It's illegal for you to show up at my house and punch me in the face. Like, that's your body. Like, I can't tell you what to do with your body. Yes, I can. I can absolutely tell you not to put drugs in your body. Like,

there are all kinds of rules we make. And I think this is where you're either super philosophical and idealistic or you're just pragmatic about reality. And I think where I come down is there's not enough competition to be that philosophical and idealistic, right? If there was more competition, I would be absolutely fine saying, and I think this is true in mobile, right? In mobile, you have at least four competitors, and T-Mobile is a disruptive competitor, and 18-T and Verizon are having to react to it. I think there should be more competitors. I think that would be even better, but you can at least see how that market is working. People are switching to T-Mobile. They're doing binge-on. T-Mobile CEO is like making videos. He's like middle fingers in

the air. He's like throwing bombs. AT&T and Verizon are now doing things that look a lot like T-Mobile. really interesting about that cycle is they're all starting to do unlimited plans because they all have to layer on more and more services. So T-Mobile started with free music streaming and then AT&T started doing free music streaming. So then T-Mobile started doing free video streaming. And now they're all just doing unlimited plans. Right. And it's like when the market speaks, when people actually have a free market choice, the thing that they want looks an awful lot like net neutrality. right when they don't have a market choice the thing they want is regulation that gets them net neutrality so either way what people are saying is don't monkey with my internet connection and they have

what they need is recourse if you start monkeying with their internet connection but the recourse is one person appointed by a president who's elected every four years sure but like well that's the people's recourse is the state no but paul's making a really good point that uh the whiplash of the rule around how the internet gets served to humans in America changing every time there's a new administration, there's a new group of people in the FCC, it goes from three to two to two to three is crazy making. And yes, it would be great.

No, no, no, no, no, hold on. No, let me finish. I'm making a point. All right. It would be great if Congress would make a law. You know, my personal politics, I think that if this Congress could actually pull that off. I don't know if I would like that law,

but at least than we would have less whiplash. No, we wouldn't. Are you crazy? Let me finish. Let me finish. All right. I'm like, I'm putting the ball on the tea for you, Neelah. But I, you ready?

The ball is stupid and I hate the tea. I'm walking over to the tea with the baseball. You've got the big giant plastic bat. It's a wiffle ball. You're going to hit it. We'll go very far. Isn't one of the rules around the way the FCC is supposed to work that we're not supposed to have this whiplash? That they have to have good legal justifications and it can't be, I think the phrase is arbitrary and

Capricious. Right. Okay. Thank you for the ball and the tea. Wow. Yeah. It is a slightly different ball and tea than I thought was coming. And also, I think I'm playing hockey.

It's very confusing. So, wait, just to Paul's point, his narrow point, which is we had an election and everything's different. Yes. It actually doesn't matter how that, the mechanics of that don't matter. So, like, we had an election, we elected Obama. There's Obamacare. We had an election. We elected Trump.

And they're furiously trying to undo Obamacare. that happens all the time. Like, you can't stop it. The end point of that is we should have a king, right? And the king will just never change his mind. I'm saying that the policy... I vote for a queen, actually. The policy...

Let me finish this thought. So the check on that, which is what you want, which is you can't elect somebody new, have them appoint some new people in regulatory agencies who weren't actually elected, is what Deeter is saying, which is the FCC has to provide stability. to the market. They understand that the market needs stability, and they are not allowed to

change their mind in an arbitrary and capricious way. That's in the administrative law of our country. So Pai has to make a case that since the time of net neutrality passing in 2015, something has changed so much that provides him a reason to undo it. Right. And his argument is that broadband investment has slowed. That's his argument. So we passed net neutrality. If broadband investment had like, everything was going great, then he wouldn't be allowed to change it. There would be a lawsuit and they would sue him and the court would say, this is just an arbitrary change. You're not elected.

You can't do that. He's saying, well, broadband investment has slowed. That law was obviously bad. That regulatory interpretation was obviously bad. So I'm changing it. It's not arbitrary. And that's where the fight is going to be. So the information service thing, the broadband, the broadband, the broadband.

the broadband investment thing, all that stuff is what people are going to fight about. So like, also I think the court, just based on what I'm seeing today, I think it would be foolish for a future court. So I know free press is going to sue the FCC. The ACLU is going to sue the FCC. The EFF is going to sue the FCC. He's going to take this vote on the 14th and he will immediately face a lawsuit that says this is arbitrary and capricious and you can't do it. Right. And that somebody in our chat right now is the FCC doesn't answer. anyone, it's beyond the people's reach. No, it's not. You can just file a lawsuit. And I think Pye is walking into a lawsuit that says his decision is arbitrary and capricious. And so you just,

the EFF has a Twitter thread here that I'm looking at. Yeah. Well, actually, before, just, like, the thing you didn't say in that rant is that we just, we just know that this is going to pass, that the FCC is going to vote to undo net neutrality rules and convert it to Title I. Like, it's three to two. You can call your congressman to put pressure on the FCC people on the board. You can call Ajipai, you can call whomever, but like, we know this thing is going to pass, right? It's going to happen. Yeah. And then the lawsuit starts.

And the lawsuit starts. So, okay. And this is like, are you enough of a single issue voter to vote Democratic or Republican based on broadband regulation? It, who knows, right? Yeah. But it seems... Ask R slash the Donald, because that's an exciting place right now. Right. So, yeah, the Donald Trump subreddit on Reddit

is like torn asunder because, right, because that, wouldn't exist, but for net neutrality. If your ISP could have slowed down Reddit in the early days, or they could have looked at the Donald Trump phenomenon in Russian interference and decided to start blocking certain kinds of content, you wouldn't really be able to stop them and you wouldn't really be able to switch. Reddit existed before 2015.

Right. And people lobbied for net neutrality before 2015 and the run-up to the FCC's decision. Right. Because the Brand X decision was bad, is like a piece of this in the background. And people really wanted net neutrality because they started switching in huge numbers from dial-up internet to broadband internet and realizing they had the competition. They were pretty far down that road by 2015, and Comcast wasn't blocking Reddit because Reddit did a blackout. I think you're over, I think you're being over. optimistic about broadband penetration in the United States.

These are the fears that were sold to me, like going into 2015, like you don't want to get like a $10 bill because you decided to use Twitter that month or something like that or you don't want to pay extra for Netflix or you'll have a slow lane or something like that. And I am arguing that broadband companies should have the right to do any of that stuff. But I really don't. most companies don't do something that their customers will absolutely hate. We end up disliking a lot about what companies do, but you can definitely push it too far.

I mean, I would just, again, there's, like, philosophy and there's realism, and there's, like, the reality is Comcast's most hated company in America. They do things their customers hate all day long, right? AT&T is, like, they're around. people don't love them. They have an enormous number of customers. But they clearly realize that there's a line that they shouldn't push past that there's such a thing as too much hate. And Comcast pushes past that line all of the time. Comcast blocked BitTorrent.

There's another company called what was it, Madison River Systems that blocked Vonage. Comcast prioritizes its own TV service to various devices. Like AT&T wants to buy Time Warner. The main thing AT&T wants to do with Time Warner content is give it to you for free versus. versus non-time Warner content. Like, this is the future, right? It's coming at us. And they want to do these things that people don't want them to do.

And what people want as a rule, preventing them from doing those things. Or you could start all over and build more competition. But the world in which, you know, the, so Comcast bought NBC, right? They signed a consent decree saying they would basically abide by net neutrality until next year. next year, that consent decree goes away. There's no net neutrality. And suddenly, NBC programming, universal movies, will come to you for free over your Comcast lines and everyone else will hit the cap.

So the minions will be free and I don't know, Milana won't be. Right? Like that's not an outcome that people want. And we all know that the phrase, the minions will be free is a contradiction in terms. Because by definition, by the dictionary definition, they're minions. They're not supposed to be free. I'm not saying everybody gets everything. they want no matter what the rules are.

I'm saying if you try sometimes, you just might find. No, but Paul, you don't have a choice. Get what you need. These companies, these companies can do things you hate and they do them all the time because you can't leave. Right? That's the thing. The philosophy question here is Paul doesn't believe these companies are going to do bad

things, but maybe they will, but who knows? But should we make a law preventing a company from doing a bad thing before they've done the bad thing? Okay, so this goes to the other thing that Pye brings up, and Paul had been talking about, which is maybe the FCC doesn't need this power because the FTC, the Federal Trade Commission, or the Consumer Protection Agency, would be able to do this stuff either. So I'm just going to read more from Pye's document because I think it's important to keep referring to his actual argument. So he says most of the examples of net neutrality violations discussed in the net neutrality order could have been investigated as antitrust violations, which is where the DOJ or the FTC comes in. Madison River Communication blocked access to voice over IP to foreclose competition with its telephone business. An antitrust case could have focused on whether the company was engaged in anti-competitive foreclosure. Whether one regards Comcast's behavior towards BitTorrent is blocking or throttling, it could have been pursued as an antitrust or consumer protection case. The FCC notice that BitTorrent service allowed users to view video that they might otherwise have had to purchase through Comcast Video on Demand service, a claim that would have been considered anti-competitive.

Comcast also failed to disclose this network management practice and initially deny that it was engaged in throttling, potentially unfair or deceptive acts of practices. So he's saying, okay, Comcast is throttling BitTorrent. If we discover it and they haven't disclosed it, someone can sue them, very unclear who. If the DOJ wants to make the case that throttling BitTorrent unreasonably preferences Comcasts like video on demand service, they can bring a lawsuit to. So instead of a rule, what you have is the hope of more lawsuits. And to be clear, the one thing that this new, this removal of net neutrality is leaving in place is the rule for transparency about actions. Sure. Yes. Probably would like the companies to say what they're going to do. Now, how much transparency in the form of that transparency is not, it's not mandated, right? Because how can you possibly tell a private? a company what to do ever except be transparent. So if they could bury it in a small print,

and this is an important loophole, they don't have to be transparent about anything they define is a reasonable network management practices. So if throttling a bunch of Netflix at 8pm is a reasonable network management practice because everyone's using Netflix, they want to preserve some service or some bandwidth for Hulu, they don't have to tell you that. You have to discover it. Then you have to sue them to say, this isn't a reasonable network management. management practice, and then you have to further win a lawsuit saying this is anti-competitive. So, like, that's a lot of lawsuits. So what you had was a rule, and now Pai is saying, well, we can just have a bunch of lawsuits

that get us back to the rules, which seems like if what you're worried about is costs, you have just created the opportunity for legal costs to skyrocket. Well, I, so here's a straw man situation for the reduced investment, right? I'm Verizon. I want to do this kind of crazy thing, but I, I, I, so. I'm not sure if the FCC will allow me to do it under the 2015 rules. So I do it and then the FCC says, no, I can't. And then I need to argue in court that the FCC was wrong to ever even have these rules.

Or outside of these 2015 rules, I do it. And then the FTC says that's anti-competitive. and then I can argue whether or not it's anti-competitive. I don't have to argue that the FCC has overstepped its balance. Like, I don't have to argue against the entire existence of a government agency. I just need to decide what it helped or argue in front of the court whether or not what I've done is anti-competitive. And there's a lot more literature and legal, like my lawyers, before I do that potentially anti-competitive thing, my lawyers can look at this great body of legal argument about what ends up qualifying as

anti-competitive. Where with the FCC, I'm not quite sure what they're going to decide. And it's up to them. I don't really track. I think there's a body of law for everything, right? The country is very old. Well, it's not that old. But the country is like, you know, a couple hundred years old.

there's literally every word in in in pious document here there's a body of law undergirding every single work right that's how precedent works there's like branching precedent and your lawyers do lawyer stuff i think what you're asking is like are we making are we making rules where you have to fight against the rules or are we making rules where you're free to do something and somebody else can come in and fight to enforce the rules right or right is the burden on the company or is the burden on a consumer that might be harmed. I generally think the burden is on the company. And I think only for this reason, the best way for a consumer to address a harm is to stop paying you.

Right. That's what we want. Like, Paul, I think you and I are actually far more aligned of like the basic free market principle there than anybody would suspect. Like if you, if I don't like what I'm getting, if I don't like the value I'm getting from you when I pay you for a service, I should just take my money away. You'll react to that. The problem is that 51% of Americans have nowhere else to spend that money. So they're stuck. So you now have this incredible leverage as an internet service provider to do anything that you want.

And there's no immediate redress from me. I have to spend more money to pay a lawyer to address your behavior. So if we pass that cost back to that set of internet service providers and say, here are the rules. Like this relationship is not equal. The rules are you can't do X, Y, and Z because the people have spoken and through some complicated set of government processes, you've created rules. I think that's fine, right? That's the difference that keeps coming back to between idealism and, like, pragmatism. Like, that's fine.

If there were, like, 500 competitors, I'm just going to take my money away. So, but there's... We do that all the time. There's two slightly different things here, then. there is what FCC rules will lead to the most investment and what FCC rules will lead to a certain minimum of internet service. And I would argue that the new, no nut neutrality rules are designed to lead to the most investment, which will hopefully foster space internet and Project Loon and whatever. So we can actually have competition, right? So, right.

But if you have enough money to do space internet, right? Like the marginal cost of your lawyer applying for the waiver to the rules so you can build a new technology is like pretty low. Like it's not going to stop you. You're not going to like, oh my God, I've got to bill a lawyer $10,000. Well, you need the money from what exists right now to fund your space internet. Sure. But I'm saying that the percentage cost of the league, like if you have the, you have the, you, ability to put rockets into space, you probably have the ability to pay for a lawyer because

you can't do that without lawyers to begin with. So like, there you are. But like, Paul, you and I are talking hypotheticals. I'm just going to read this. It's from the EFF, so it's obviously a biased list. But here's their list. More than a thousand small businesses, investors and technology startups in all 50 states have publicly opposed the rollback from net neutrality. More than 900 online video, 900 online video creators have produced content for more than 200 million viewers. oppose the FCC plan. Fifty two social justice, civil rights and human rights organizations have filed support of net neutrality. Dozens of ISPs across the country have told the FCC to leave the rules in place. 120,000 libraries in total across the United States want net neutrality.

Privacy organizations want it. State attorneys general from Illinois, California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Oregon, Vermont, Washington, and D.C. support retaining net neutrality rules. 60 mayors. Association of Real Doors? Just wandering in the door at the last minute. What are we talking about, guys? Right, like. And then there's like a lot of argument about the comments, but it's like millions of comments and support.

So you do have this extreme amount of public support for these rules. And at some point, you just have to deal with it. I don't think you can just say, we'll have more innovation if we let companies do whatever they want. People have deep relationships with their internet service providers. They understand the parameters of that relationship. And they think that those relationships are unfair. And they want some rules in place. I think however you feel about government, you have to respect that in some way.

And I think Pai is aggressively ignoring it. In fact, we know he's aggressively ignoring it. his his like at least his wall street journal piece it seems like what he mostly paid attention to was small providers who claimed that it was burdensome on them um and and and you know the numbers about investment i feel like there was one other thing that he pointed out but those are his two things for sure and he brought up in the again the opening this document he brings up um rural and and and in rural broadband access um so that's interesting Right. It's interesting because what small broadband providers care about is not having to do a lot of like record keeping because they have to hire accountants and bookkeepers and whatever. That's a cost. And if you're like a two person ISP, that's a big cost. But he waived those requirements. So the original order in 2015 waived those requirements for like some number of subscribers. And then Pai came into office and waived them for an even huger number of subscribers. So most small ISPs with like 200,000 people. 200,000 customers, they don't have those costs anyway. And Jake Castanakis actually talked, we have a great story on The Verge. He talked to a father-daughter ISP in Colorado that were like, we completely support Title II. Like, this is fine for us. Don't worry about it. So there's, again, there's a lot to litigate there. He's not, Pye is not the only person speaking for small ISPs.

The ISPs are fully capable of speaking for themselves, and a huge number of them are saying they want Title II. And then on the investment piece, This is, I think, where the arbitrary and capricious, where the argument is going to be made, whether or not this is arbitrary and capricious. Arst Technica has an amazing series of articles about this. In public, the broadband companies, Verizon, AT&T, Comcast, whatever, all claim Title II is killing us. And then on their own earnings calls, they say to investors, Title II isn't a problem.

Our investment is going up. We're going to be the best and win everything. So there's a staggering disconnect between what Pye is saying and what we're going to what these companies are saying to their own investors. And they, they, they're not, I mean, they're not allowed to lie to their investment on earnings calls. Like, those are, they have a fiduciary duty to those people to tell the truth. And they could get sued a lot if they're lying. So one presumes that they are telling the truth on those calls versus what they're saying in public.

So that's like, that's the whole argument, right? Like whether or not you believe broadband investment has fallen because of net neutrality, whether or not you believe the internet is an information service, which is like broadband internet. Oh, by the way, can I just say that I said this at the very top of the podcast, but he also wants to switch wireless from being a commercial radio service to a private mobile service. A commercial radio service is anything that connects to a common carrier service, basically. Yeah. So like if you say the internet is, so like think of it. about telephones. So your copper landline telephones are common carrier cell phone voice calls over cell phones connect to that network. By definition, it's a commercial radio service and can be regulated this way. So they switched the broadband internet service to Title II, and they said LTE is now a commercial radio service because it connects to a common carrier. So we can regulate it this way. Then they now that now Pye wants to switch broadband internet access from sorry, I think this is hilarious.

Mobile broadband. No, he wants to switch broadband internet access, the internet from telecommunications to information service. So he does that. And then he's allowed to say, oh, well, this LTE network doesn't connect to a telecomications service. Now it's a private mobile service. They could do whatever they want. It's like, it's a shell game. And I say that in like a kind way.

It's a shell game because that's what lawyers do, right? They like line up all the definitions and they push the domino over and they're like, see, I was right all along. And that's 100% what he's doing. But fundamentally, the question is, do you have the market power, you yourself, to take your money away if your ISP does something you don't like? And just most Americans don't. That's the answer. And so most Americans are saying, I would prefer the government to mediate this relationship. Okay.

Okay. So like, what's going to happen? So on December 14th, they're going to have this vote. It's going to pass. A bunch of organizations are going to sue the FCC. When do I have to pick my. internet package, the super premium plus version with HBO now, Hulu Plus, and Netflix. So what's amazing about this. With the bonus extra stuff for like Reddit and Twitter.

So what's amazing about this, amazing is it the Trump administration is such chaos. They can't even get it all right. Right. So the FCC is saying, okay, AT&T, do whatever you want. Get out there. Go crazy. And at the same time, the Department of Justice is saying, hold up AT&T. you are not allowed to buy Time Warner. So I think if it was different, and the DOJ was letting the Time Warner deal go through, you would see, in short order, the Time Warner deal closed.

AT&T now owns HBO and CNN and whatever. You would immediately see AT&T customers get free access to those services. And then you would immediately see Comcast respond in next year when its consent decree expires. You would immediately see Comcast start to, prioritize NBC services on its network. And you'll immediately see Verizon start to prioritize oath services from AOL and Yahoo and Go 90. And you already are starting to see some of that stuff,

right? Go 90 through a complicated arrangement of payments, Verizon's Go 90 unit pays Verizon for sponsored data and Verizon customers get it for free. That is actually just a shell game that is stupid. Wait, that's happening right now? It's happening right now. How is that possible? because Verizon offers sponsored data. So if you're a startup or whatever, you can pay, nobody uses it. But Verizon's own Go-90 buys data from Verizon and then gives it to Verizon customers for free. I mean that the current regulations are toothless and aren't doing anything for anybody? It means that Tom Wheeler's FCC right before he left did an analysis of these schemes.

and it found that T-Mobile scheme of binge on, of music freedom, of whatever, was acceptable because it was not discriminatory. So, like, any music service could sign up for it and you just get it for free, and there was no costs associated with it. And AT&T and Verizon schemes probably violated net neutrality because they had this price discriminatory element. Then Tom Wheeler, like, flipped the table, left the building, and no one did anything about it. Like, that's where he had gotten to, right? He did this long investigation about it.

And I interviewed him right before he left and I asked him about it. He was pretty clear that that's what he was going to do. Yeah. By the way, so this. When T-Mobile first started, it's binge on stuff and I like stood up in the room and asked John Ledger about neutrality and he got real mad at me. And then he started cursing the verge and made fun of my title, actually, which is really funny.

Anyway, people were like, why are you mad at T-Mobile for giving something for free to his customers? That doesn't seem like a problem. for net neutrality. And it's because we knew at the end of this story was Verizon having the legal justification to offer, you know, go 90 to its customers for free and AT&T having the legal justification to give CNN for free but charge you more for, you know, something that isn't on Time Warner's networks. Right. And Paul, I think that comes down to the real, at the end of it, the real problem here, which is you do not want to be in a place where,

Comcast owns MSNBC and MSNBC streams to your phone and Fox News costs you extra money, right? You just don't want to be in that place. As much as I hate Fox News, you don't want to be in a place where your broadband provider is now making price differentiation based on points of view that it holds that promotes that. So, like, there's a, that's why free press, which is a speech, a free speech organization is like, after this so hard, right? They're saying, leave the internet alone. This isn't about startups or whatever.

This is about core private regulation of speech. So, like, there's just layers and layers and layers of this. I just brought up the fact that I interviewed Tom Wheeler. I interviewed Tom Wheeler, the former chair of the FCC twice. I wasn't easy on him. I interviewed Michael Powell, who runs NCCA during the run-up to Net neutrality in 2014 and 15. He was the former chair of the FCC. He is a Republican.

He now runs the largest cable. company lobbying group. It's basically Comcast lobbying group. He answered hard questions with me. We've interviewed Jessica Rosen-Worsel. We've asked her hard questions. Like down the line, Mingian Clybourne, who's another FCC commissioner, we've interviewed her and asked hard questions. Down the line, we have interviewed these people who are public servants and asked hard questions about their policies, and they've given their answers and like, whatever, we agree with them or don't agree with them, but they're willing to take the questions. Pie is not. And I think that If I want to come to one thing, we've gone way over here, but if I want to come back to one thing

most clearly, is it elected or not, these people are public servants. And Pai is facing this huge backlash, and he is not being responsive to it in any way. He won't take hard questions in any forum. He won't come. If you think we're his opposition, if you think I'm his opposition, he won't talk to me, but he won't talk to, I've seen, I don't know, I've seen probably a dozen people who host podcast tweeted him over the past two days saying, hey, we'd come out of podcast, he's not going to any of those. He is just doing this without doing the associated work of justifying his plan in the face of hard questions. And I think if anything's the most dangerous piece of this, it's that. But he's not answering to the people through the channels

that we traditionally expect our politicians to answer to the people. And I think if you would just start doing that, like I would actually calm down a whole lot. Right. If he would start saying, if he would, so Steve Cobach, who works for Business Insider, FCC announced its plan. Covatch gets on the press call and he says, hey, you keep saying this thing about broadband investment, but according to the numbers, I'm looking at, you're wrong. Like, can you justify the discrepancy? Which is a great question to ask, right? Like, well-thought-out question from a good reporter. They just said, next question and moved on.

They just refused to answer his question. He's so mad about it. Yeah, you know, we're talking about it. And a lot of other people noticed it. It's there at that level, right? where the fundamental question that they need to answer, that they will have to answer in front of a court, they're just not even acknowledging. They're just saying this is the right thing to do and they're moving on. And I think that's the mess. Like, whatever, policies are policy. Elections come in,

you know, in four years will be another one. Maybe it'll get even crazier in one direction or maybe it'll swing all the way back. Like, that is the nature of elections. But once you take the office, once you're doing the job, I think you have to be responsible to the people. And pie is definitely not doing that. Stunned silence from Paul. Eli wins again. Yeah, I really wish you to get all the podcast. It would be really nice to talk to him.

I will say there is something. Well, he has a standing invite to come on the show. Yes, he does. Yeah, in fact, we should, we should ask our listeners to ask him to send him a hangouts link on Twitter, Deeder. He's at Adjipa I FCC. A-J-I-F-C. Tweet at him.

I think if you've been listening to this, Wait, if you've been listening to this, Paul and I have known each other for a long time. We obviously disagree about this. But we are also friends. And I think if you've been listening to show, we are very nerdy. We are very willing to get into the weeds of this argument with him. This is a great show for him to come on and make these arguments. It's not actually a hostile space.

It's not an opposition space. And please don't, don't like, tweet offensive crap at him. I've seen like, like, I made a joke about the ratio on his happy Thanksgiving tweet. And I was right. A bunch of people tweeted nasty things in him to just saying happy Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving, please be kind. But like, and we intend to be kind and fair to him on this show. But we do want him to answer the questions that he's refusing to answer.

Yeah, he just won't do it. And I think, again, and he's racing this through, right? He put out the plan the day before Thanksgiving. He's pushing a vote on December 14th. Like, the amount of time the American people have to react to this is just very low. But you've got to give them credit. It's more time than there was in 2015. We at least get to read the full text.

No, I disagree. I disagree. I disagree in a serious way. In 2015, what had happened was that was five years after the FCC tried to do something in 2010. They finally did the thing that the courts told them to do. So there was a huge run-up. FCC originally tried to put net neutrality regulations in place under Title I. And Verizon sued them in one.

If Verizon hadn't sued them, it would be fine. We would have net neutrality rules under Title I. We wouldn't have all this burdensome additional regulation, but Verizon decided they didn't like it, and they sued them. And they won. Great. And the court said to them, if you want these regulations, you have to use Title II. So then there was a massive run-up again. And Tom Wheeler's first instinct was to not do Title II. It was to try to shoehorn them into yet another statute and go to court again. And basically, the public pressure was put on him to use Title II. So there was that. like that huge run-up. I mean, it was just an endless process where Verizon, they did the rules, Verizon won the case years later, and then Tom Wheeler was made to use Title II with a combination of, like, a court ruling in public pressure. So, like, that's not the same as this.

Like, that process was so long. It might not have been out, out as in front, and there might not have been, like, this document, like, here's what the FCC is voting on. But the process that was going through, like, we covered the hell out of it. like every month for four years. So I just don't, I don't see that argument. Like, I get what he's doing. Like, I'm more transparent.

You can't read the, like, whatever. No human can read this document. I will say in just that abstract sense, I want it to be as easy for an agency to devolve power as it is to, to grab power. And I really do think of 2015 as a power grab by the FCC, constitutional or not. It really bugs me. I'm really happy to see AgaPai trying to do.

devolve power, and I hope that he has correct legal arguments to do that. And I see how they're a little tenuous, but I hope he makes it through. And I'm sorry, I know a lot of people hate that I even open my mouth to disagree with net neutrality. But yeah, it worries me. And I really do think it puts speech more in the hands of the government. If you're going to make a free speech argument, I understand that it's scary for private companies to have so much control over our speech, and that bugs me, but it worries me even more that the FCC would have that. To me, Paul, that's like fundamentally, like, this is, like, the question about this regulation is, do you trust the government to, like, do the right thing about it, or do you trust these

private corporations to do the right thing about it? Especially if you don't have a choice. Normally with private corporations, you can say, I don't have to trust them or not. I could just choose not to give them my money. And in this case, I don't think we have that option, or 51% of Americans don't have that option. And, yes, I'm like, I'm with you that the idea that I would, you know, put more power into the government seems scary. But I also, like, who am I more afraid of? Big giant, you know, corporations or a big giant government?

Well, in theory, at least, if we're talking about philosophy, I can vote for the people in the big giant government in a way that I can't in the big giant corporations. Yeah, Paul, I mean, look, I think this is why I like, this is why we wanted to do an emergency podcast. Yeah. Like, you and I disagree. I think it's interesting to talk about the parameter of that disagreement. But to me, it's, I don't, I'm stuck at what power to the FCC grab? I couldn't tell you, right? Like, the FCC did a thing that the people of the United States were very vocal about wanting,

which is restricting the ability of private internet companies to block speech, basically. and if you don't have a choice, I think that's a totally acceptable function for the government. Like, the government needs to do things. Otherwise, reminds us would not have one. And I think right at the end of that again,

is like, are you an IEList or are you a pragmatist? Like, do you live in this world or do you want to live in a world of a dogmanist? Well, Neal, I am a narco-capitalist. I'm glad you asked. Yeah, I'm just not. Like, look, we're home for,

I'm in my parents' house, right? Like, we're home for the holidays. It's like their relationship to this technology is not, and they're very smart. They're doctors. There's a model of a heart back here somewhere. As an MBA, like their relationship to technology is not as sophisticated as to understand

what AT&T U-VERS is doing to their connection. They don't give a shit. They have better things to do. And like that's the slippery slope of danger, right? Where Netflix is buffering and they just are like, fuck it and they use U-Ver. Well, they're not going to, they're not going to file the consumer protection lawsuit. They're not going to investigate whether that's a retail network management practice.

So the scope of potential harm, unless we sit around doing our job and like investigating what every company is doing and you believe the press when they find out, or consumer advocacy organizations which are not like well funded or doing the work. Like you've just moved the cost. You've moved the cost from the company to this diffuse set of other actors and they're not going to win as the companies get bigger and bigger and bigger and collect more profits. Like that to me is the reality. So we've gone way over.

Dieter, do we miss anything? Probably. I could make more points about being afraid of like, you know, normal non-techie Americans not seeing the point here or not seeing the danger here, but we definitely need to stop. But okay, I'll say it. I'll say it real quick. Like, yes, last night, like we were going to watch a movie. And it was like, well, okay, I'm just going to find something good to rent.

But everybody else wanted to like find something. free on Netflix to save the four bucks that it would cost to stream something. And if it's built into the internet service that you can get CNN for free and Fox News costs two bucks, people will definitely just watch CNN. And like, that's the danger. If the network gets to give you something and gets to preference content, then it is the network choosing what you're watching because people have a very, very, like, lizard brain desire to just take the cheap. thing. Yeah.

Okay. Did anybody get anything good for Thanksgiving? Are you supposed to get presents? Is that what we do on Thanksgiving? I don't know. It's Black Friday. By the way, I will say, okay, we're going to end the show. I'm going to promote some things.

It's Black Friday. Yeah. The Verge website is full of Black Friday news. So go look at that stuff. If you're listening to this live. On Monday, Paul, you're hosting gadget emotional support. Yeah. Oh, I'm so excited for this.

So any emotional problems that you have. dealing with Cyber Monday. You can call us live. It's going to be in the morning, Eastern Time morning. So get ready for that. It's you, Ashley and Haim, right? Haim is our deals expert,

and Ashley and I will be providing the emotional support. Yeah, so if you see a hot Cyber Monday deal, you don't know what to do, call Paul and Ashley and Hyam on the Circuit Breaker show. So that's happening. The Vergecast is,

I won't be on it next week. I'm out of town. The Vergecast is back next week. week. And then Ashley and Caitlin are back with Why'd You Push That Button next week. You can also listen to Too Embarrass to Ask with Lauren Good, who's wonderful. She's that show with Karras Wisher. Karras Wisher, equally wonderful, host Recode Decode. And then Peter Kafka hosts Recode Media. And I am sure that Recode Media is going to have some net neutrality and AT&T stuff on it coming up because two biggest stories in tech policy happening right now. Thank you very much,

everybody, on the chat here for joining our Renegade Black Friday, Net Neutrality podcast. I know it's the hottest thing going right now, but it's important to us. I'm, I will just say this. I think it's cool that three of us can have a conversation, which we disagree about something this fundamental and like, have it be, have it be cool. So please take that into your heart, try to have cool conversations. I appreciate that too. And assuming that if I wasn't here, and it's just the two of you, and you all agree, was your, like, call to action? What are people supposed to do? Um, There's a couple ways. The thing you should do is you should call Congress, right? Congress can put a pressure on the FCC. I saw some well-meaning what's all tweeted, Ajit Pae and Michael O'Reilly. They're not going to change your mind. Call Congress. You can go to Battle for thenet.com. The EFF has a tool. Just make that phone call. Like, it's easy to do. You should do it if you believe in it. If you don't believe it, you can make the phone call too. But our government needs to hear from us and maybe something will change. So, like, make that first move. It might feel like nothing, but it adds up in the

aggregate and it will turn into something. And then when it's lawsuit time, we'll all just, I don't know, we'll huddle for warmth together, it'll be fine. Yeah, that's the Vitchcast, renegade style. Thank you for joining us. Rock and roll. Promote.

Promo code. Hey.