Transcripts For CSPAN2 Communicators With Mark Jamison 20170911

Communicators. Mark jamison, a visiting scholar at aei, a Net Neutrality. Hes interviewed by Reuters Telecom reporter, David Shepherdson. Take for example what we call fifthgeneration wireless. 5g. It is a technology that we start being rolled out next year and it will be a place for about a decade or so. It very specifically has built into it what they call slices. Each slice can be customized to a particular service or particular customer or a particular edge provider. Whatever it might be, it is designed to do that. That violates that idea of same treatment of bit. Net neutrality is out. Watch the communicators tonight at eight eastern on cspan2. Cspan, where history unfolds daily. In 1979, cspan was created as a Public Service by americas Cable Television companies. It is brought to you today by your cable or satellite provider. And this week on the communicators we want to introduce you to mark jamison. Hes currently a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise institute but fulltime is at the university of florida where he is director of their Public Utilities Research Center director of the telecommunications studies and a fulltime professor. He is on the president ial Transition Team focusing on telecommunications and the federal Communications Commission. Doctor jamison, welcome to the communicators. Thank you. I also note in your biography that youwere, at one time, head of the National Association of a regulatory Utility Commission. What does regulatory Utility Commission do . Just a small correction. I was a chair of the committee within the National Association of regulatory Utility Commissioners. Thats very different. It was a subcommittee, not even a full committee. What apublic Utility Commissioner does in the united states, for example, and his transfers around the world, as well is they regulate utility. It is things like setting with the Service Quality standards would be, what the prices will be and those are the biggest jobs. Some countries its books focus on infrastructure rollout and development and in some instances its determining how markets work and that is basically the job of the utility regulator. Thats the formal job. What i also tell and i train a lot of people around the world in this and your biggest job is to regulate politicians because there was a time when utilities were regulated directly by legislative body in by city council and that system never worked very well and failed it would go out of business, investments would not be made and so a little over a hundred years ago we set up these agencies called independent commissions to be a buffer between the political pressures and the need for investment that takes 20 or 30 year. No small part of the job of that regular is to keep the politics out. s when it comes to public Utility Commission they can regulate cable, water, electric. Very rarely cable but telecommute occasions is very rare and is it statebystate. What is your role of the president ial Transition Team. My role there is to serve on what is called the landing team which was to work with, work with the Transition Team and the federal indications commission to help you figure out what exactly what policies and what kinds of directions there might be for the fcc. That was different than a lot of planning teams because the fcc is an independent agency. A and present cant say whatever he or she might want to say but you still need a majority vote for something to happen. In a sentence or two how would you describe your telecommute occasions philosophy. Might tell occasions philosophy is the customers are in charge. Everything we do, everything i do, when i talk about regulations and when i teach about it is how can you put power into the customers hand so that they drive the market. Well, to help us look at some of the issues that the Telecommunications World is facing today is David Shepherdson who covers telecom for reuters. Thanks. Public utilities the Biggest Issue by far is the Obama Administration in 2015 to reclassify Internet Services like a public utility under the 1930s asked. Commissioner pye has proposed reversing that decision but has left a couple of Big Questions unanswered for the commissioner to decide. Does the fcc have authority to regulate conduct by the isvs and if it does,should it and should it retain any of the existing protections under the 2015 title to order. Where do you come down and where do you should the fcc go from there . Impact a lot into that question. One of the things that you set up front which is really important you said that was a decision by the Obama Administration and that needed to be a decision by the federal Communications Commission itself. And with a lot of political pressure in the drove part of that decision. That is a challenge for us. Im not a lawyer so some of the legal aspects of your questions i cant address but my understanding from talking with experts in the field is that it doesnt have Legal Authority to do regulations and exactly where in the law it finds that authority. There are some areas where it can have a light handed touch regulation and other places where it can be very heavyhanded and what the fcc chose in 2015 was to choose that heavyhanded part that we call title to which was written for commentators that werepublic utility. They were all monopolies at that time and so the laws were designed and going to exist forever and they didnt and broadband probably the better someplace else. Thats all that might happen if we were to lift those titles regulations but it would be like things had been before. With respect to what it is people might be afraid of, theres been very few instances of blocking. They are giving customers options. They can give us a lower pridprice if we slow down your traffic when we have high traffic. Customers are given choices which is the way i think it should be because it puts the customers in charge. With respect to the pay prioritization, that can make customers better off. I did a review with several other economists on that particular issue, its hard to find scenarios in which that hurts customers. It generally helps him. Youve written about whether companies are too big. You dont think theyre too big for the opponent say as a small number of companies are increasingly responsible for almost everything we do from facebook, google, amazon and netflix, is there a role for the federal government to ensure these companies do not use their market dominance to prevent new entrants into the market or ensure consumers truly have options . Certainly for thats why we have the antitrust laws. They are there to stop things were someone in a competitive way keep someone else from competing with them. Thats been around for a long time and we understand how too do that. I find people are more talking about amazons huge or googles huge and facebook is huge and the size seems to concern them. Especially in the technology industry, it is you and me making decisions every day, several times a day that makes those companies as large as they are. So its hard to fathom a scenario where you could tell customers id really like to buy the item from amazon but were to force you to go someplace else or to tell some customer when they enter google to do a search that we redirect them someplace else. That doesnt make customers better off. I think whats important to understand, these types of companies are as large as they are because of the choices customers make. Mark jamison, isnt broadband, id love to hear your definition of what broadband is today. Isnt it as important as electricity or as a telephone or water in a sense . Thats up to customers for the definition of broadband, i dont have one pair thats for customers to decide. Thats something i have written about. For a lot of people, they think about should broadband be 25 megabytes or should be some other speed. Customers are making these choices. They are telling us what they prefer that i would just as soon have regulations follow the customers in terms of what is broadband. Is it essential . Thats for customers to decide. Whether or not its essential doesnt change your regulation. Food is essential. Oxygen is essential. A lot of things are essential for everyday life but we dont put a regulatory scheme on them just because theyre important. What would be the downside of regulating the broadbands arena, as we would electricity or some other utility . One thing you get is less investment. That is the nature of that type of business and we saw some evidence paid we cant prove its true, but we saw some evidence that the case. Want to start limiting the opportunity for growth and change him you get less investment. What encourages me more than that is instead of having a marketplace where people have to compete for customers satisfaction, customers attention, now they have regulatory so they can stop competitors and gain advantage. Profits are made or lost in the regulatory arena rather than the marketplace. I think we should keep things in the marketplace. The critics say, if you look at some of the specific Market Dynamics that there are four major Wireless Companies that control 98 of the market. Historically the government has raised concern for sought to break up companies that become too large. Do you still think the marketplace is such that new entrants into the market, as these Companies Get bigger and acquire larger and larger market share. Absolutely. Theres a word he used that i want to take issue with not that word of control. There is nothing that puts google in control of you saying im in a search with google or nothing that puts you in control of saying youre gonna purchase something on amazon. People decide they want to reach you so they advertise. These companies dont control. Theyre simply doing something customers really like and thats a good thing. In terms of thinking about should we break them up, if you take the at t breakup, for example, that was a situation where the government had said at t, let me back up. The government thought it said at t, you can be a monopoly. Turns out the government didnt really say that and thats why competition was made possible. At t abused that position. It did it to discriminate against other equipment manufacturers, people trying to connect with the network but it was because of government control. Theres been some Good Research that shows that the government really made a mistake there. It really wasnt a natural monopoly. It couldve been competitive if the government had stayed out of telling at t you can be a monopoly and thats okay with us. So what will prevent companies from using that evidence to try to discourage using competitors or get through zero ratings or taking aggressive actions to shift consumers. You topped an equivalency thats not really there. These are companies that have earned their way by satisfying customers. As far as being concerned about what they might do, again, it goes back do we have antitrust laws specifically for that. If there is something this company does that harms consumers, because it behaves in an anti competitive manner, we have laws in place and procedures in place that can deal with that. Not all things that we might think of as being discriminatory really are. Zero rating, for example there are services targete to the poor and to the disabled that use that reading because paying for data is an obstacle for them getting the service. Its not necessarily a bad thing. Going back to all the research my colleagues in the economic field have done, we found there are sometimes and act like that that can be bad. Most the time its good so how can you have regulation that allow good things to happen and stop bad things. That is with the antitrust laws for her to stop bad things. Do you think their failures with the fcc should be aggressive in regulating . To try to get broadband to rural areas but the market doesnt deem it competitive. In general where you think the fcc should be taking a more heavyhanded. Actually think the fcc is making some good progress. On that issue that you identified, there are spots on the map where there is no broadband today. Too do that, the fcc, its finally adopting some practices that have been around for 20 years. It started in latin america and spread to africa and europe and were just adopting it. We said we find places where there is no service and then we asked the question, how much do we think would cost to provide service there and what might be the revenues. Costs are way up here in the revenues are way down here. That looks like something you might want to subsidize and theres a few different ways of doing this but i will go into details but the question is how do you know how much that subsidy should be and who should get it. The fcc adopted more recently this idea of a reverse auction that says okay, will start out at a Million Dollars to serve this area. Who would do it for 900,000 who would do it for 800,000. They get it down to where it stops and thats the subsidy amount. Thats how you decide who would provide the service but theyre not excluded from having competition and how much the subsidy should be. Thats exactly the right way to do it. Mark jamison, you recently wrote an article for the American Enterprise Institute Website Blog Technology is outsmarting Net Neutrality. Is looking at some of the basic ideas of basic neutrality Net Neutrality and it showing we have progress that is bypassing those ideas but theres basically two ideas. One is the idea that every packet that enters the internet should be treated the same. They should be no discriminatio discrimination, no favorable treatment over video versus voice versus anything else. The other one is customers should be allowed to go anyplace they want on the internet as long as they are doing things that are legal. Technology is closing both of those. So take for example what we say fifthgeneration wireless. It is a technology that will start being rolled out next year and it will be in place for about a decade. Its very specifically built into it what they call slices. Each slice can be customized to a particular service or provider. Its designed to do that. That violates that idea of same treatment. That throws Net Neutrality out. The technology is going to do Something Different than what the policy people that favor Net Neutrality say they would like. I also talk in their about the netflix affect which is also not just netlike but a lot of the large content providers are building their own networks. If you are i wanted to start a Video Service or some other content service to compete with the big guy, we couldnt do that. We have to use the public internet. And so, by bypassing that public internet, theyre making the whole issue. The third thing i talked about was the apple affect where customers can go. This is the non blogging blocking, customer should not be blocked from going to a site thats illegal. Many of it is going over mobile phones and their driven largely through apps as opposed to browsers. Have places to let you go in places they wont and customers love it. It violates the idea that customers should be able to go wherever they want to go. If you are using netflix at home you are going through whatever cable wire is in your house. Depending on where you are, its probably not going to the public internet. Its using internet technology, but netflix is connecting directly to what we call the head end of your Cable Company thats using Different Technology and it never goes to the public internet. It is a direct connection that they have prioritized to themselves. With the slicing, is there discriminatory basis to that rather than how its currently structured. You might call it discriminatory, but its different. Take for example, if you and i were talking over the internet, first we were sending email. The demands of those two services are different. Our computers dont care when the email is sent or arrive. They can go all over the world and come back and end up with you. That works just fine. It doesnt have to happen that all the letters in the email arrive in the right order. They can come in the wrong order and your computer will sort it out. For your me to talk, that can happen. For us to talk, the voice has to travel at a particular rate. It has to be true that you have to be hearing it almost the same time im speaking or becomes very hard for us. It has a very Different Technology demand than any other kind of data. Thats what 5g is trying to address. It slicing up the network so these things that really flourish can be treated differently. Is it a new Regulatory Environment thats required . No you dont need a new Regulatory Environment. 5g has other challenges that regulators are trying to deal with. As far as how should data voice, and video be treated . The customers are saying i like having this kind of conductivity in this kind of response time. The technologies are adapting to get customers those kind of services. A year ago, the big fight was over settop boxes and whether the sec should give customers the right to use drop that. A year later that proposal died and theres more and more tv watching on our phones and people are finding ways around that. Is that an example of where the market was moved beyond where the regulators were going to be . Do you think more Television Watching shifts to our phones and away from traditional, will we need new regulatory paradigm or think about Cable Companies differently. I dont think we need to shift our paradigm in this country shall so much. What you are describing is a situation where customers are engaging with content through multiple platform. You might have something on your phone for little bit but then you get to wherever youre going see flip over to maybe a Television Set or computer and they engage with three or four different devices all continuing this, whatever it is that youre doing. We treat all those the same. Thats not a problem. You get outside the u. S. And people are really struggling with that. I was in an asian country earlier this year talking with their regulator about how they can cope with that because they very much regulate content. Content coming over the internet escapes their legal mechanisms for controlling contents of the trying to figure out how too do that. Heres how the technology work, heres how customers are using it. Your approach, if you want to control content, it has to be fairly different. We are moving to a place where there wont be traditional stations, shows to watch and networks to subscribe to, what do you think in terms of the growing consolidation, at t buying time warner, what is that going to mean . Are these multiheaded companies posing a different regulatory challenge . I dont think they necessarily pose a regulatory challenge, but the things they are telling us do. All these companies are trying Different Things. Some of these ideas succeed in some of them fail. One of the examples i always try to keep in mind was many years ago when aol and time warner, there was a lot of concern over this that aol had instant messaging. They dominated instant messaging and they were going to take it to a higher level and their content from time warner they were just going to control the market. Within a year, that was all gone. In fact, a merger didnt even work. Theres one thing i try to keep in mind, these companies are trying to tell us, whether not trying to tell us, the telling us whether they want to or not, they dont know where its going, no one knows where its going. Thats one of the beauties of the system. Lots of Different Things can be tried in some more work and some will not. What that means for the regulatory community, and here im bringing in more of the antitrust and i encourage the fcc to think about it as well, the way that we have thought about markets is pretty much gone that we used to think that a market had a boundary and that customers all chose within the market and when you would look at a merger where we would look at an antitrust issue or regulatory issue, one of the first things we had to do was identify that market boundary. Anytime you analyze and gather data and make decisions, the world has changed. What i think we want to do rather than use old data to make new decisions, is to ask ourselves the question, what could possibly keep this market from working well . Is it something we cant keep track of . What could stop it from working well, and address those issues and not worry about trying to say we can see this outcome in our going to try to control it read by the time that arrives, its too late. What are some of those things in your view that could stop it from working well. There arent very many. I went clear back to the first economist we had talked about these issues and reviewed the literature and is just not very many things that actually can. Most of them involve the government which was kind of surprising. I didnt expect that. If you look at the early economic sliders, they were railing against monopolies but they were always created by the government which parallels to what i said earlier about at t that is the monopoly was really a grant from the government although it wasnt done very well because it didnt last. Its those kinds of things whether something unique that no one else can get or duplicate and thats what all the service is based upon. That is something we would look at and say if this is really true, then that triggers this because we havent thought through what those regulations would be like. It would be Something Like that, that exclusive technology or some facility or something that no one else can use. Thats the kind of thing that id be focusing on. I have a paper that goes into more detail but i cant come up with it off the top of my head. Back when you are at sprint, what kind of issues would you face . Fortunately i did not. I was part of a small think tank. There were two economists, two engineers and our job was to think about where is this industry going and how should the Company Think about this. My title was Regulatory Affairs managers but i didnt regulate many affairs. We had attorneys that were responsible for all those interfaces. They would call on me to be an expert bu, but my job was really to be a think tank. With a face these plus the fcc plus congress . We divided them all up. There was a congressional lobbyist and the state legislative lobbyist and regulatory directors and i dont know who interfaced with this. That would be basically their work. One of the big rules are the ownership rules that lets of unchanged things, when you apply market perspectives to newspapers, radio stations, where you think they should go from here. Thats an issue i havent studied very much. The basic principles go back to something i was talking about earlier. Mark jamison has been our guest on the communicators. He is currently a visiting scholar at aei. Hes also a professor at the university of florida where he is there public utility Research Center director and he served on the 2016 president ial Transition Team. Thank you very much. On capitol hill, the house will meet for a pro forma session today returning for legislative business tomorrow at noon eastern. Lawmakers decided not to meet for legislative Business Today as members deal with Hurricane Irma in their home district. When they returned, they are expected to continue work on a package of federal spending bills for the first votes are expected tomorrow afternoon. The Senate Returns this afternoon to begin work on the 692 billiondollar bill to fund the department of defense. Live coverage of the senate today at 3 00 p. M. On cspan2. The house tomorrow on cspan or you can stream coverage using the free cspan deal at. Last week both the house and Senate Passed about 15 billion in hurricane relief. We will continue bringing you updates on Hurricane Irma on cspan. Tonight on the communicators, mark jamison, a visiting scholar at aei on Net Neutrality. He is interviewed by Reuters Telecom reporter David Shepherdson. Lets take fifth generation wireless. 5g. It is a technology that will start being rolled out next year end it will be in a placin place for about a decade. It has built into it what they call slices. Each slice can be customized to a particular service or customer or provider, whatever it might be. It is designed to do that. That violates that idea of same treatment of debt. That throws Net Neutrality out. Watch the communicators tonight at eight eastern on cspan2. The center for strategic and International Studies held a daylong event recently to discuss the u. S. South korea alliance. The north Korean Nuclear threat came up frequently throughout the discussion with current and past south korean leaders, former u. S. Officials and policy experts. In this session we heard from Florida Democratic represented Stephanie Murphy who serves on the House Armed Services committee and we also hear from a former International Relations and ambassador to a south korean. This is about an hour. Good morning. Thank you for coming to thegi 2017 u. S. Strategic form. We would like to thank our partner for this event, the Korea Foundation for their support. We are fortunate to have richard and the president of