Transcripts For CSPAN3 Telecommunications Policy Conference Part 2 20170620

In one minute, if everyone will take their seats, please. You become so quiet when i say that, that i shouldnt even wait the full minute. Thats fantastic. So we are going to get started now. Again, i think that was a terrific session to get the conference started talking about regulation more generally. Although, i knew there would be. As i said in my welcome that i think throughout the day were going to hear a lot about Net Neutrality or restoring Internet Freedom or the open internet proceeding, whatever name interview you prefer to call that proceeding by. And we did hear a little bit during the previous session. So i just call this the allstars panel. Im not sure i came up with another name. I dont think there is necessarily a better one because we do have a group of all stars here and were going to be digging in, im certain, to Communications Law and policy issues. So what i want to do is just do brief introductions, as i said at the beginning you have everyone here has the brochure where we have the full bios there. The brochure is also on the website. For those of you in our cspan audience, i want to welcome you. Were very pleased that cspan is covering the conference today. So what im going to do is just introduce alphabetically our panelists. And im actually going to ask them to speak in that order. Thats probably as good as any other order. Again, once again, Meredith Baker here, finds herself in that fortunate spot, if she considers it so. I am going to give you the brief version of their bio, maybe Say Something personal about each one possibly and, you know, again, they have a lot more that you can read about in the official brochure. So our first speaker is Meredith Baker. She joined ctia as its president and ceo in june 2014. She previously served in the Bush Administration as the acting assistant secretary of commerce for communications and information, as well as the acting administrator of ntia, the National Telecommunications and information administration. Now, while at ntia, she did a lot of important things, of course. But one thing that meredith did that now perhaps may be forgotten, but its very important, she really is the person that facilitated and led the transition at that period to the Digital Television format. And, you know, it was so easy going that it that, you know, it made it seem as if it might not have been as difficult and as much work as went into it as did. But that was very important. Of course, there were a lot of people that preceding meredith to make that happen, but i always recall that because it was very important at the time. The other thing ill say about meredith that i always like to point out in case she forgets is that she, upon becoming a commissioner, gave her maiden address at a Free State Foundation down freconference, s nice enough, but she had to come back from south america and go straight she came straight from the airport into another room here at the press club to deliver that speech. And it was a good one as well. So i appreciate that. So next, after meredith, weve got david cohen, as almost all of you know, david is Senior Executive Vice President at Comcast Corporation and hes the companys chief diversity officer. He has a broad portfolio of responsibilities, including corporate communications, government regulatory affairs, public affairs, legal affairs, Corporate Administration and community investment. I dont know what you do during the rest of your day, but by the way, when david was in law school, actually, he was known as chief Justice David cohen. He and my brother were actually in law school together. Not at duke, for the record. No, not at duke. But everyone makes mistakes. But david was chief justice. Now, my brother actually didnt tell me that. Thats on wikipedia, so you can take it for what its worth. But anyway, it says that he was known as chief Justice David cohen because of his intellect and because of his work ethic. You know, his responsibilities tell you something about his work ethic, but also i do know from my brother, because they were partners in a law firm together, that david was the managing partner and it was not unusual at all to get emails at 3 00 in the morning. That probably still happens around comcast, i suppose, but that goes to his work ethic. So david were glad to have you with us as well. Next is kim keenen. This is the first time that kim has been with us. Kim is ceo of the Multicultural Media Telecom and Internet Council otherwise known as mmtc. Kim, i guess, what i would say to you, because i dont know much about your law school career, i know kim is also a former general counsel of the naacp. But what i want to say to kim is that over the years weve always, well for many of our conferences, weve had one of your predecessors from mmtc with us. And, you know, even before the name was even before the name was changed. Thankfully, the acronym remained the same. Yes. But ive always thought it was important for our purposes here to have the perspective of mmtc. So im glad that youre with us here today as well. So next weve got blare levin. Blare is a senior fellow with the metropolitan policy program at the Brookings Institution and he serves as director of gigu. You know, i mentioned that howard shelanski, when i introduced him this morning, i said that his position is often referred to as the regulatory czar. Blare, as you know, was head of the National Broad band plan, in developing it. I know he always points out it was a team effort, which i know it was. But he was a leader and some of us thought of him at that time as the broadband czar. The only other thing id say about blare is that were old friends. I mean, were both old. But were also friends. Were also friends. And, you know, i know that once and weve got different views about a lot of the issues were going to discuss. Mostly carolina and duke. But we have a lot of common views as well. And i know sometimes we say to ourselves just dreaming that if we were the communication czars and were writing a new Communications Act or something that maybe he and i could do it together and come up with a halfway decent act. But, so, im glad youre with us today. And then last but not least of course, down there is bob quinn. Bob is Senior Executive Vice President , external and legislative affairs at at t. Hes responsible for at ts Public Policy organization and chairman of at t foundation. Hes been with at t for, you know, for a long time. He steps into the shoes of jim zakoni, who we had the pleasure of having with us on many occasions, and it is a pleasure that youre here as well, bob. So now what were going to do, the way were going to conduct this session is ive asked each of these three excuse me, each of our panelists to just take three minutes initially to give us their perspective on what ought to be the fccs priorities or congresss priorities with Communications Law and policy. I know thats fairly broad. And regardless of what i would have directed them, they you know, sometimes they talk about what they want to. But i am going to enforce this three minute limit. And thats going to give us a basis, im absolutely certain, to have a Good Exchange back and forth. I know ive got questions. We are going to try to save some time for questions from the audience and have an informative and i think interesting discussion here with these allstars. So, mrs. Baker, why dont you start us off. Thank you, randy. It is a pleasure to be here with this esteemed panel on this auspicious day at this great event. It is my birthday, so im only going to answer questions that i want to [ applause ] so i think were going to hear a lot about Net Neutrality and privacy, so im not going to start there. I think were closer than a lot of people think we are. But im going to start off with my opening remarks in a different place. I dont know how many of you saw this article in the wall street journal. It was about, i dont know, ten days or so ago and its talking about the Consumer Price index falling, surprisingly last year from april to april. And nearly half of that decline was traced to wireless telephone services. So think about that. A slowdown of inflation was caused by smartphone price decline. Our consumer bills went down 12. 9 because of competition last year. I think thats remarkable for two reasons. I think that the size of the Wireless Industry to effect the economy is interesting and important. And i also think the fact that the power of competition to save americans money is also important. Now, that power of competition is also driving the market in wireless to do the next thing, which is 5g. Weve heard a lot about 5g networks, so what i want to do is talk about what 5g is, about what impact 5g is going to have on our lives and then talk about what policies we need to have to get there. Sorry about the odd view over here. Okay. What is 5g . I think weve heard the speed is going to be remarkable. It is 100 times the speeds we have today. Thats Home Broadband speeds. The scale is going to be connecting everything, everywhere. I kind of had an ahhah moment when i looked at intels prototype car. Now, we talk a lot about vehicle to vehicle. But were really not talking vehicle to vehicle. Were talking about vehicle to neighborhood. And thats a lot of data that our 4g network could not handle. So that is the reason why another reason why were building these 5g networks. But the really transformative thing i think about 5g is the realtime effect of it. There is virtually no lag time in 5g. And what that can do in its applications in health care, with remote surgeries or in transportation, energy savings, education, i like to say i think were only limited by our imagination by what 5g can do. What is it going to impact . It is going to bring three million new jobs. That means one in every 100 americans is going to be employed by our industries and thats not even talking about the verticals. It is going to add 5 500 billio to our economy. If we get the policy right. So what do we need to do to get the policies right . In the last 30 years, the wire lts industry built 150,000 towers. We need to double that in small cells growth for the next few years. And to do that, to build these new networks for 5g, we need n rules, and that includes siting. And when i talk about siting, im talking about at every level we need to have access. We need to have affordable access, and we need to streamline the process. Were going to need more spectrum. There is nothing in the pipeline right now. We are going to need low, mid and high band spectrum and it needs to be internationally har mom niced. Its going to be 275 billion. We need policies that incent that. This is a global race. And the consequences of us losing are jobs that will effect our entire economy. There are trials all over the world. We won the race in 4g and we need to in 5g. Okay. Thank you, meredith. David, please. Great. Thanks very much, randy. And it is a pleasure to be here. And i always appreciate it when you ask us to distill the complex Communications Policy issues that you wrestle with on a day in and day out basis to three minutes. You would never hold yourself to that standard, but maybe between maybe between the five of us in 15 minutes we can hope to cover some of the breadth of Communications Policy issues that i think are on the top of the pile, if you will. Youve got about two minutes and thirty seconds left now. I got it. So im going to focus on two higherlevel policies. I think i look at our current internet ecosystem. I think its the envy of the world. I dont think there is any country, any continent anywhere else in the plan net that has been able to develop the internet ecosystem we have in the United States and i think it is pretty easy to understand why. It is because of a consistent, light regulatory touch that has been developed by democratic and republican administrations up until the last five years or so. And so the number one priority, i think, for our company, for our industry and i think for everyone on this panel and meredith already eluded to it is to figure out how we keep the United States on the leading edge of innovation and investment for the internet ecosystem. The private sector has invested oneandahalf trillion dollars under that light regulatory touch to build out this network. That is twice the per capita rate that existed in europe. And we have developed open and Accessible Networks and an open and accessible internet. And i think it is absolutely crucial that we develop policies that will facilitate continued investment and continued innovation in that space. It is very hard to look at any fcc decision or action, any fcc within the window of a news s k cycle or two within a year or two. But in the end the legacy of the last five years of the Obama Administration will be an unexplained, unnecessary retrenchment on a policy that indisputably was working when it moved to reclassify broadband under title 2 and absolutely undercut the United States advantage for innovation and investment. And i think it is why our number one priority is to support the chairman of the fcc in unraveling that reclassification of broadband. Not in unraveling Net Neutrality rules. No matter how many times the opponents of his actions say it, it doesnt make it true. Getting rid of title 2 does not mean getting rid of Net Neutrality. The claire man couldnt have been clearer. Our industries couldnt have been clearer, and im not going to be any clearer today than to say you can support Net Neutrality rules, but you dont have to do that under title 2 with all of the baggage that comes with title 2. Which brings me to my second overall priority, which is once we have this internet ecosystem that is the envy of the world, we have to make sure it is available to everyone. And thats thats what thats what universal broad band deployment and adoption is all about. I applaud the chairmans focus on this. And whether its through a combination of further buildout of networks or technology, we need to figure out a way to get broadband to all of america. But lets remember the numbers also matter here. There are about four times as Many Americans who dont have access to the internet today who have broadband built out in front of their homes already as there are americans who dont have broadband plan because the broadband plan has not been built out to them. So we should never lose focus of the extent federal dollars and programs are going to be poured into that. We need to keep our eye on the ball of what were trying to accomplish, which is to sign more people up for the internet. Which means those dollars should be devoted to unserved areas, not to socalled underserved areas, or well end up with lots of federal dollars going into a bucket where you cant even quantify how many additional americans were signed up to the internet as a result of 6 billion of federal funds being extended. You have to focus on the adoption. And these are great opportunities for Public Private partnerships, a combination of federal programs like extension of lifeline to broadband and private sector programs like many of merediths companies have, like at t has, like comcast has to be able to provide broadband to lownew mexico populations across the United States. So i think if we keep our eye on those two overarching policies, we can make a lot of progress in the next year or two. David, thank you very much. So now well turn to kim. Okay. So im going to pick up where david left off because thats what we do every day. I think it really people really need to hear that there are people who have broadband in front of their home, but they dont have broadband, that there are communities, that there are tribal lands and places in West Virginia and, you know, this is an american issue. We spend so much time dividing ourselves and slicing ourselves, but if you have kids who live in a community where there is broadband around the corner or broadband at the library or broadband at the fast food place, but they dont have access, theyre not just left behind, theyre left in another place because they dont have an opportunity to be part of a digital economy. We care a lot about ownership and diversity in this space, but we also care about making sure that every american is connected. And we spend so much time. You know, all of this is lost. You have all these people saying, you know, youre giving away something for free. Youre going to have a wall garden and theyre only going to have a little bit of the internet. The truth is if you let somebody in your garden, theyre coming to your house. And we need to be focussed on that. Never lose sight of the fact that we have americans that dont have this. I had the opportunity to go to brussels for the conference, and we do have a system thats the envy on the world. We have to keep our eye on that because we have to make sure that every american has this opportunity. Why . Because in 2020, there is going to be millions. It used to be a million. But now it is millions of jobs in the digital space. Tele health is going to be education. If you got a kid and theyre not using the internet to do their homework, i dont know who theyre going to compete with in the future because you have to have this opportunity. Thats our number one priority. I care about that. And however i pick on any of these issues, youre going to know the mmtc is thinking about the people who dont have this and who will not be able to survive in a dig cal world. There is some less sexy issues, by the way. The prison phone issue. The notion that people would pay more to make a Long Distance call because their loved one is in a jail and you have all these states that are appending all these sort of fees to it, thats not a popular issue. Why . Why . Because that says a lot about who we are as americans that we would charge families a tax on their pain. Why are we stripping their revenue for that when it could go to broadband or Something Else . Another thing i want to mention these other things that people dont think about. Theyre not thinking about multilingual Emergency Alert systems. You know, its when there is going to be a next disaster, not if there is going to be a next disaster. And when people cant broadcast in the other languages in the community, we doom them to not being found, to not being safe. And we doom the people to go get them to having to do it under the worst conditions. Any policy we pick has to care about whether we reach all of our citizens, wherever they are, because as david just said, we have the capacity. We have the talent. We have the technology and we can make this sell. Kim, thank you. So blare is going to be next. Blare, when i introduced you and said we were old friends, i didnt really mean to imply that you were as old as i am. So ill apologize, if necessary. No apologies necessary. Okay. As a matter of political capital, its obviously well spend most of it on Net Neutrality. The three issues we ought to focus on are the same issues we focussed on, the broadband plan and others around the world. How do you get affordable bandwidth everywhere, how do you use it to deliver public goods and services, including economic development. Thats where the focus ought to be. One of the things thats consistent with what a lot of folks have said, i would note when you understand the economics as well as kind of the social elements of those three questions, a lot of it resides in the cities, not in the federal government. And we could argue and maybe we will later on about whether the what the federal government is doing is actually helping cities move in the right direction or Something Else. But thats really been a lot of the focus of what i have been doing since the National Broad band plans with cities. But i also have to say most of the money i made in my life i made on wall street. And from a wall street perspective there is really only one question, which is how far is consolidation allowed to go . I think we will look at the next three years from the perspective of ten years from now. Next few years are going to be very, very important because there is going to be a wave of consolidation. But the question is what is allowed and what is not allowed. I think the conditions are much less relevant. But that, as meredith said, from the beginning, what competition has gone to the Wireless Industry and whats thats done to the overalso economy, if Market Structure is the single most important issue, and that will be tested in a variety of ways in the next couple of years. Okay. And bob will be last. I just want to remind you, for those of you who werent here in the beginning that we do have a twitle ha twitter handle. It is on your brochure. So feel free to tweet if you would like. Bob . Is there a reason why you did the twitter thing right before i spoke . Ive heard that you are a tweeter. Well, thanks, randy. Thanks for inviting me here. For the record, im not as old as either of these two guys. But, you know, all the good things have been said. I cant i couldnt agree more with with the focus of meredith and david and kim on deployment and adoption. I agree with blare, consolidation is going to be on everyones mind. Its certainly in virtually every news story that comes out in this space, and i think it is going to dominate the press for a while. But the area that i would go to, and it really kind of echoes the comments that meredith made about 5g. I mean, the way that we create jobs in the telecommunications space is we dig up streets. And when meredith talks about needing 150,000 small cell towers, you know, thats the way that the Telecommunications Companies, the Broadband Companies in this country really, really create jobs across the board. And i think that tax reform is going to be a dominant policy. If you look at the tax rates that are paid by the largest investors in this country, the Telecommunications Companies are at the top of that list, and i think the percentages that they pay in Corporate Income tax are very, very high. And i think if we could reform that and reform the tax code to free up more capital for investment, but also to change the way that we look at some of the investment thats made, i think that would go a long way towards clearing the way to building the 5g networks of the future. And when you think about the 5g networks, i know that we always think about Wireless Infrastructure and cell towers that cover multiple miles, two, three miles of coverage. In the small cell world we will need fiber every couple hundred meters. So when i talk about digging up streets, thats some serious digging p streets. It is going to implicate a lot of the local issues that blare highlighted in his speech. We are going to have to be able to get into the rights of way in order to be able to deploy that fiber. Were going to have a lot of issues. You know, verizon is not on the panel, but i know when verizon wanted to do vios ten years ago, mu nice palties didnt have the right attitude about it. It should have been we welcome this. We want it. How do we compete for the business . When google entered the business, it changed the way some municipalities think about it. But were also seeing some retrenchment in the area of small cell. If the country is really, really serious about the United States leading in 5g deployment and the point that meredith made is if we lead in 5g deployment, we will lead in employment in this country. So i think we really need to tie these policies together. I think its got to be tax reform. I think its got to be incent e incentives to encourage the buildout of the infrastructure on the wired side and the wireless side and i guess the point that i was trying to make earlier is its not wireless. Its you know, these are wireless radios for the last couple hundred feet now. These are all infrastructures being built. Bob, thank you. And thank all of you for those Opening Statements that i think gives us a basis to dig deeper into these issues, which i want to start doing right now. So the theme of this conference, actually, you know, each year i try and pick a theme because the issues dont always change dramatically. Thats actually a challenge sometimes. But this year, there is a new administration, a new fcc. And, so, the theme for this conference is a new direction for Communications Policy, less regulation, more investment and innovation. Now, i understand that everyone might not agree with that sentiment, but but thats at least the view that i have in general. What i want to do in terms of the first question is ask the panelists in connection with our theme. You know, everyone talks a lot about, including randy may, about the discouragement from investment if the regulation is overly burdensome or rigid or costly, if its more than it needs to be and specifically with regard to Net Neutrality we talk a lot about the impact of the title 2 classification on regulation, right . So i want to ask the panelists i guess principally initially bob or david and meredith can chime in and the others as well, but can you you know, we talk about that and say it so often that sometimes i think we forget that theyre actually decisions being made, you know, that go directly to this point. So if are there examples that you can give where your businesses where you believe that the regulatory regime, the current one, has impacted Investment Decisions . Anyone want to i could take a crack at that. I mean, first of all, if you look at at t, you know, whats happened since those rules were enacted, those rules were essentially announced, we moved in a lot of different places. We moved into mexico, where they instituted some regulatory reforms trying to encourage other companies to come in and build infrastructure there and that coincided with what we were seeing here. I think the thing about title 2 that i think is the overhang on the market is that title 2 is essentially a rate regulation tool. Now, when wheeler announced the rules, when former chairman wheeler announced the rules, he announced the rules and said that we were not going to get into rate regulation. It was just a matter of time before we got into rate regulation. We started to see the movement almost immediately upon the enactment of those rules. We had a lot of focus on free data that the Wireless Companies were offering. We had a lot of focus on usage allowances, on both the wire line and the wireless side. And i think the fear is what we saw in europe. I mean, europe has a very regulated structure on the Wireless Services market. And i think, you know, after ten years of policies where they did rate regulation and they did extensive wholesale regulation, europe was faced with the prospect of having gotten passed by in the 4g deployment race. They acknowledged that was because the kinds of policies were moving towards. Thats what companies are reacting to and i think that overhang was there and i think that the Prior Commission was making a lot of Movement Towards that. On the contrast Team Contrast to that are the policies that were adopted in this country from the mid90s on, which were really aimed on trying to build a Communications Infrastructure that incented companies to make the investments to move from the analog voice era into the digital broadband era. And those policies were started under the clinton administration. They were accelerated under the Bush Administration. And even at the beginning of the Obama Administration, if you look at the National Broadband plan that blare put together, blare and hundreds of others, but which blare led, i think they put a plan together that recognized the importance of getting these networks built and having the right conditions to build them. I think the mistake was walking away from some of the concepts were that National Broad band plan and going into a title 2 rabbit hole. David . So i think its a great question to kick us off because i have to say i find it almost puzzling that there is even a debate around the issue of whether a 1930s era regulatory scheme that was designed to regulate price and access, if i could add that, how could that not have an impact on investment . For anyone whos ever worked in a company that has to make Investment Decisions, the notion that academics and even nonacademics, just activists would try to argue that that does not have an impact on Investment Decisions is creating an alternative reality to the way in which we conduct our business every day. So i look at your question at three different levels. Where we do capital budgets, where we do longrange plans, where we talk about our Capital Investments. And since the since the prospect of title 2 was raised, the fcc administration, every single one of those discussions at comcast has been burdened by the prospect of what title 2 means for the business. Now, cap x investments are complicated. There are a lot of different factors involved. I mean, we have to respond to competition. We have to make sure that we have to make sure that our networks on rate, or else well blow up our whole business. But the notion that the regulatory structure here has not impacted our decisionmaking is just dead wrong. It impacts it every single day, and ive seen it dozens and dozens of times. I also want to add into the investment calculus. The impact on innovation. And this goes to something bob talked about. So, you know, zero rating plans in the wireless space. Team mobiles bing on. Comcasts original stream tv, which wasnt even an internet service. It was an ip delivered service in the home, and we end up with a yearlong fcc investigation, which essentially delays the launch of a service that potentially could be incredibly popular with customers for 18 months. So there is a crystallized example of how, again, as bob says, the Commission Said were not going to get into this, and then we end up with a 12month investigation by the fcc into something that isnt even covered by the open internet rules because its not an internet delivered service over a bias network. So thats level one. Level two is to look at the numbers. And weve got free press and the Internet Association who have hired people who have done about the most facile you can imagine. Because said, look, theyve gone up. So obviously there is no impact of title 2. The problem is its that is an argument that does not reflect the reality of cap x decisionmaking. If you are going to look at anything in publically reported numbers, you could be looking at capital intensity. Thats how you measure what the business might really want to be spending on cap x. So for comcast only, based on the same public numbers that free press and the Internet Association used, but making an assessment based on capital intensity, that is the percentage of our revenues that were spending on capital investment, as opposed to the actual capital spent, the leveling off and even reduction of capital intensity since the adoption of title 2 suggests that comcast capital spend alone is going to decrease more than 2. 5 billion over a threeyear period. And then the third level is the variety of studies that are out there that attempt to look at this in a more sophisticated fashion than the free press and the Internet Association studies and that can be whether the ford study or the hosinger study, all of which conclude there has been a significant reduction in Capital Expenditures and Capital Investments by osps as a result of the adoption or reclassification of broadband under title 2. Thank you, david. Im just going to ask blare to refer to earlier his connections to wall street. And i know he thinks about things in economic terms, as well as others. So if you want to jump in and respond to these two, you can do that. And then meredith will give you a short just a short time. First of all, you know, im an impurist. I can only reflect the rooms ive been in. And while david is here, rebecca and i wrote our first wall street piece on Net Neutrality in 2002. Its been a long time. And sometimes one doesnt learn new things. But i would say in the last five years, when ive been on wall street really hasnt been an issue. Sorry. You could look at the piece that greg moffit, who is a very well respected analyst and, by the way, opposes title 2. He wrote a good piece yesterday on why hes upgrading at t and verizon from cell to neutral. It had nothing the words Net Neutrality dont appear. First net appears. Mergers appear and the competitive marketplace appears. But it just really and if you look at the comments on quarterly calls, i dont think anybody has said you ought to short equipment people because there has been a lack of investment. I am sure that bob and david are accurately reflecting those discussions internally. Im just saying from the investor perspective, what drives investment, what drives their excitement about things. 5g is an interesting issue. I dont think any investor thinks its that dramatically affected by what is primarily, i think, a legal question about how you ground your Net Neutrality rules. So i bob made, i think, a really important point. When verizon did fios, they did it in a traditional way and the cities responded in a traditional way, which is oh, great, youre a mo noppy. Well take as much money as we can. One is, are you better off with essentially raising nontax revenues from a source that may or may not mind, such as a phone company or a cable company. Or are you better off having the foundation for Economic Growth in an information economy . And every city i have talked to has decided its much better off to do the latter. And the second thing was they have understood and this isnt about regulation. This is about management. Remember, cities are the Construction Managers for large projects. And they had to make a lot of changes. You look at the 30page agreement between kansas city and google. A lot of things different. He said, hey, lets do a gig city somewhere. He said well never get the same deal google got. At t has moved forward and done a lot of things because there has been a significant change in cities. That drove investment. What google is doing drove investment. Whether that continues to do so, of course, is a different question. But competition drives an awful lot of investment. Consumer behavior and internet. I think we will do have inhom fidelity twoway video that allows people in their 80s for 90s where randy and i are quickly moving towards, to be able to avoid going to the doctors every week, youre going to see a lot of takeup of higher levels. I would Say Something that i im going to stop you pretty soon, not because of that comment but because ive got a lot of questions i want to move onto. If i can just make one comment, if we have gigs everywhere, the debate about Net Neutrality becomes a lot less because the incentives to essentially use band width to discriminate kiend of go away. Thank you. Meredith, if you have a brief comment, why dont you add it here and well move on to another question. Just briefly, i think that ctis annual survey has been a reliable source for reporting numbers for quite a while. This year the annual survey showed for 2016 a 17 drop in investment. Now, Companies Make investments for multiple factors, multiple reasons but to say that something as intrusive as title two doesnt enter into that equation, isnt credible. We have decreasing investment at a time we need increasing investment if were looking to build out these new networks and its going to take 275 billion. Thats what im talking about when we need the right broadband policies to incent investment. Do you have a comment . Im not going to talk so much about investment as to say the point about innovation. Light touch regulation got us to where we are today, and there wasnt something that happened that stopped that continuation, and the fact of the matter is when companies started giving free data away, people kept saying, they should be able to give it all away. But what happened was, when one Company Started giving unlimited data as a plan, all the companies started doing it. I remember saying to somebody, well, if one does it, the other ones are going to do it. And that was a benefit for consumers because when you get your bill every month and you go over that data limit, lord knows if you got a teenager youre going to go over that data limit, then this was huge and its continuing to evolve and we dont know where its going to go. So rather than cutting it off before it can get there and get to people who cant afford to pay what all the people in this room pay for the five devices i see all of you having, theres a whole lot of people out there that dont live like that. So i think its important that we think about how its interrupting the ability of this industry to go where it really could go and make a difference for every american. No one has ever challenged unlimited data as being title two. But they investigated it for a year. That was a different thing. The zero rate. Zero rate, right. Zero rating and unlimited are two very Different Things and frankly unlimited makes your rating kind of a nonissue. As i say, we might continue that discussion later, but i do want to get in a number of things so im going to move on. I think blair referred to his First Encounter with Net Neutrality in 2002 i think you said. I actually dated mine to 2004 when i went back and looked. So youve got two years but anyway, its been a long time, and hopefully we will get to a point some time soon. I dont want to say in our life times because im thinking much sooner than that where maybe this issue will be resolved in a proper way. And towards that end, i want to ask this question, and listen carefully because i dont want to go back. I want to focus on this question. Lets just say hypothetically that youre negotiating a compromise with the other side, whomever the other side might be at the time. With the current rules as the starting point, what would you consider the elements of the current regime that must be eliminated from your perspective, that must be eliminated in order to reach such a compromise . It may be that will get us a little further down the road in understanding what lies ahead and the way we ought to think about it because were all thinking about it in terms of the comments are going to have to be filed. I know you guys have been thinking about it and this is your opportunity to be telling your staffs how you want those comments written that are going to be filed with the fcc. Who wants to go first . I think they just elected me to go first. So let me say this. I again want to use this as an excuse to say what i think this proceeding is about, which is i think this proceeding is about reclassifying broadband under title one and not title two, and i think theres a whole body of evidence that were all going to cite in favor of that proposition. I think the ancillary issues, and they are ancillary issues to the guts of the proceeding, are what should strong, legally enforceable Net Neutrality rules look like . Because weve all said and repeatedly say were for strong legally enforceable Net Neutrality rules. So im going to take it a little bit opposite way but ill do it quickly. I think theres a broad sen sens consensus that strong legally enforceable Net Neutrality rules include no blocking, no throttling, no discrimination and full transparency. Those are the four Core Principles of open internet principles Net Neutrality rules. I think there are then a smaller set of issues about which there is at least some potential disagreement. One of those is paid prioritization, and i actually think julius janakowskis formulation is a workable starting point for a discussion about how you deal with paid prioritization. I remind everyone that at the time that the janikowski fcc put out its rule there was no uproar over his treatment of paid prioritization. So i think thats a reasonable on either side. So i think thats a reasonable place to start. I think the number one issue i would identify in the tom wheeler fcc formulation that has to disappear is the socalled general conduct standard which is basically an importation of section 201202 of title two, into Net Neutrality. There was never a general conduct standard in any formulation of Net Neutrality rules before tom wheeler came along and this rule came out. And the way i would describe the general conduct standard is its a catchall that says that any practice that any isp engages in or potentially edge provider, even if it doesnt violate the principles of Net Neutrality could be subject to challenge under the general conduct standard. I actually think its a doubleedged sword because in one type of fcc you could use the general conduct standard to attack zero rating rules. In another type of an fcc you could use the general conduct standard to say that a decision to throttle Internet Usage once a particular customer reaches a particular level is something that were going to authorize under the general conduct standard. So depending on your politics of the fcc, the general conduct standard can be used either direction in the Net Neutrality debate, and since the purpose of this is to end, once and for all, a game of regulatory pingpong that weve all been engaged in depending on the investigation for the last decade or more, maybe since 2002 or since 2004, having Something Like a general conduct standard just perpetuates the game of regulatory pingpong. So i think those you could also say how if you look at actually ill stop. I think those are the six basic areas, including the two areas where there is contention, but i really think around the four Core Principles of Net Neutrality there is general agreement. Okay. Well, now we can see why even in law school david was called mr. Chief justice back then. But that was a good baseline i think to lay out these elements of Net Neutrality. By the way, david, in the wheeler commissions order, i thought this was kind of puzzling but the order refers to that good conduct rule as a socalled catchall right in the order. Yep. Which was interesting to me. So what i want to do is i want to see whether we can get to the bottom line of what would be acceptable to you in order to say horrurray, this is somethin could live with. Bob, you can go next. I was not a voluntary by the way. You volunteered, go. I think davids got it exactly right. I think the general conduct standard, i think if you go back to the press conference after then chairman wheeler passed an open Internet Order and im going to butcher it. I dont have the exact quote in front of me but i think he was asked a question of what conduct it prohibited and i think his answer generally was, i dont know yet. I think any time you pass a rule and thats the answer from the person who wrote the rule and passed it, i think youve got a howard shalanski problem, what howard was talking about on the prior panel, and i think that was the issue we had with the general conduct standard. We saw it in action shortly after the rules came out. We got lois on free data, got calls to use the general conduct standard to go after usage al w allowances and you never knew where that was going to go and you never knew what services it was going to attack. If you think about the free data services, these are commercial services. Theyre a billing arrangement. There are commercial services that are offered to a third party to pay the usage on somebodys bill and all of a sudden you have these calls to eliminate those services, and im going to have kims back because i think the i think there is a relationship between what happened with unlimited data and zero rated Services Free data that came out. I wasnt in the rooms that made the decision to say, hey, were going to go all out with this unlimited data, but there certainly is an argument to be made that some of those moves were made as a result of the fact that free data was in the marketplace. So, you know, i think david has laid out the argument really strongly against why the general conduct standard was a problem. I think he gets it 100 right on paid prioritization. I think in an age where were talking about Autonomous Cars coming into the world, were talking about using the internet for health applications, i think the idea that you have a flatout ban on endtoend quality of Service Management that guarantees a specific level of service, i think its silly to have that. We dont know where the internet is going but i look at 5g. I look at the latency thats going to be how low the latency on 5g is going to be and theres a world of innovation that can happen in that space and i wouldnt go so far as chairman jed cow ski to say theres a presumption against it but i think the ability to be able to bring those types of services to market and, you know, whether you formulate it as, hey, they cant be anticompetitive, there has to be consumer consent, it has to be real consent, i think theres all kinds of things you can do in that space that will still allow for the kind of innovation that i think youre going to see when we Start Building these networks and start seeing the capabilities that they offer to people. Thank you, bob. Meredith, whats your bottom line here when it comes to this proceeding . So what id say is we all seem to want the same thing. We want to go wherever we can and want to on the internet and we want to incent world class broadband. I remember marty cooper coming to see me one time, marty cooper is the inventor of the cell phone. I dont know if you guys know him, hes a short little elf looking man. He said were the model t of the internet. And i think thats true. We want to go as far as we can go as bob said. We want to evolve this to where we need to and want to in order to maintain our global leadership. Im optimistic that were closer to coming up with basic rules that we can all live with and hopefully we can get congress to enact these rules so that we can stop the pingpong that david so eloquently talked about. Ckim, you want to make a comment and then im going to turn to an entirely different issue. I agree that we should have federal legislation. I just think that if its so clear what the rules are then it would just be simpler to have them do what theyre supposed to do, and its been very bipartisan all along. I think thats the thing. People kept saying, well, you know, its this administration or that administration, but the things that people have agreed upon on the internet date back to the clinton administration, to the Bush Administration, and it seems to me that maybe the people today need to look back and figure out how they were able to have bipartisan agreement on this very great thing that they all created. Okay, before turning to the next issue, im actually going to ask blair, im just going to ask him to hypothetically put himself in the position of that the other side that i referred to in my statement and just for the moment. Youve heard the comments thus f far. If youre just looking at it ill just ask you to reflect upon your personal experience because im trying to have here obviously a diversity of perspectives. And i want to keep this short and then move on, but what would you consider as sort of the element that would have to be in a change from the existing regime in order for you to consider it to be a good regime . And then well move on. I have a big problem opining on it when i dont know who my client is. I guess its like i actually mean this in a very serious way. One of my favorite moments was when tom looked at a Public Interest advocate and said im not sure i really need to listen to you. We invest billions of dollars. You invest paper. I think thats actually a legitimate point, and since i only invest paper, im reluctant to say. I will simply say not so much as my own view but i think analytically, what the panel has said is fundamentally right. There was an agreement on a set of rules. And the real disagreement and the problem with getting legislation is this area and its an important fiphilosophic area, do you keep a safety valve catchall of regulation if things change ahead of time so that you can act if theres bad behavior, or do you say, no, well deal with it if something comes up, well have to change the rules then. Theres a legitimate philosophical difference. I go in different ways on these things and i would just go back to something i implied earlier. What i think about it today could be changed dramatically if lets just say for example davids company buys charter and t mobile and sprint merge and then those two entities merge and then bobs company buys viacom and cbs and verizon and disney and netflix all get together. My point of view on Net Neutrality might change. Let me tell you who elses view might change, Rupert Murdoch and sinclair broadcast. So my point is that this is actually, i think, a difficult thing, but the problem in the legislation doesnt go to the four things that i think david said. I think theres consensus on it. It really goes to this question of whats the residual power of government in a very ill defined changing world and i think thats a hard canyon to get over. I can promise less than a minute. Okay, go. Obviously a agree with blair that thats where the rub is. And my biggest pushback to that is that Net Neutrality is not the only issue where congress would legislate and Administrative Agency be responsible for enforcing. And the way the legislative procedure act, the way legislation and regulation has worked in this country for 100 years is congress does the best it can to legislate the administering agencies the best it can to regulate, and if something needs to be fixed, you go back to congress. Thats what were doing now. Ive never heard of a catchall that basically gives the regulating agency the authority to override what congress has legislated under the guise of futureproofing the statutory standards. Weve got a 100yearold system of legislate, regulate, and when you need to fix it come back to congress, and thats all that im advocating for that we use in this particular space. Okay. Speaking of congress again, i want to turn to the privacy issue for a moment. Actually, howard sha lan ski this morning said, if i heard him correctly, that and hes the former administrator from the Obama Administration, said that he thought that the fccs order, privacy order, really was illadvised and the privacy regulation should reside over at the ftc, which i think he said had the institutional expertise to handle privacy regulation on a uniform basis. But heres my question because i know without asking, a lot of you, maybe most of you on this panel agree with that sentiment. But my question is this. Marcia blackburn just a few days ago introduced a bill. I think the acronym is the browser act. It deals with privacy. One thing it does, would have the effect of doing, is relocating or locating the authority to regulate privacy with the ftc for the internet players, right . Lets assume that you think thats a good thing. But another thing that the bill does is that it requires optin rather than optout for activities that are assumed to be sensitive like web browsing, i think, and apps usage, hist y history, things that the ftc has not considered sensitive enough to require optin. And i think that perhaps several of you im not sure. You can let us know, but previously i think you may well have had objections to requiring optin for that type of information. So thats what i really want to focus on, not the quality of treatment but specifically on whether you agree with the optin requirement and chairman blackburns proposed bill. Lets break it down and talk about where that all came from, right . Where i believe all of that came from and chairwoman blackburns bill was, i thought, a Disinformation Campaign that happened after congress did the cra and President Trump signed it into law eliminating the privacy order that the fcc had enact. And the Disinformation Campaign came out basically saying that congress had just passed a law in essence that was going to allow isps to go out and share or sell personal Consumer Information including web browsing to the highest bidder, which of course thats not what happened at all, and that story was spread by policy makers. It was spread by legislators. It appeared on a billboard in chairwoman blackburns district in tennessee. What this bill is, in essence, its the same bill that was really the fcc order, only it doesnt just apply to the isps. It applies to everyone. Our position in the fcc docket was, you cant put us under a different set of rules on privacy than you put the rest of the industry, and thats exactly what the fcc order did. I understand that but the order declared web browsing information to be Sensitive Data. They declared it to be Sensitive Data and they required us to get optin. So her bill in essence codifies it. My main concern with everything has always been we have to be treated the same. We have to have the same set of rules. We should be regulated from a privacy perspective by the same regulator thats regulating over the top services. Were getting into a world where were competing with the googles and the apples of the world. Look at text messaging, right . If we have to operate under a different Business Model with a different set of rules and cant operate with the same types of Business Models that these guys have, its a problem. So we supported what chairman blackburn put out there because what shes doing is she is enunciating a policy that is designed to create the level Playing Field that is our primary thing, and its the first draft of the bill. Well see where it all goes. But at the end of the day im only concerned about im concerned about the parody aspect of this. Okay. What i want to do is i wished i really had a lot more time, so were going to have this same group back, but i want you i want to get at this optin issue in blackburns bill. Ill do that but i have to endorse what bob said about a level Playing Field. Hes right and shes right. One other thing i agree with is creating a single federal standard so we dont have 50 regulations with 50 privacy regimes all around the country. And i agree with bob. I think what chairman blackburn was doing was putting in legislation what the fcc had done. I think it is an appropriate inquiry whether all web browsing history should be Sensitive Information or whether web browsing history on particular topics like your personal finances, your kids, and things that the ftc had previously deemed to be Sensitive Information. So im not going to im going to say that i agree with bob, this is a draft of legislation. Well see how it plays out, but i think the ultimate discussion of whether all web browsing history belongs in the Sensitive Information category or whether just certain web browsing history belongs in that category will be something that there can be a discussion about during the consideration of her bill. Randy, the groups that were out doing backflips over the fcc taking that position with respect to the isps are either silent or opposing chairwoman blackburns bill on the same topic when she takes that rule and applies it to the entire industry, which i just find remarkable, that companies or organizations that are supposedly privacy organizations arent wholly supportive of what shes doing. I think you have to start asking questions of those organizations, why. When i went to brussels to the rice conference which is about privacy and access, the two largest collectors of this data, all of this data that were talking about right now, are not isps. Im not going to name names but we know theyre edge providers, and thats their product. They monetize that product. So if youre going to have these rules they have to apply the same to everyone. Every time i talk to people who are on the other side theyre like, the isps are low hanging fruit and we have to start somewhere. But if we start in the place that isnt the place thats collecting the most data, is that really the best place, and thats why the legislation is so important. And she was so brave to just say, well if its what we want to have as our privacy rules, we need to have it for everybody. Okay. Well it sounds like this is an issue on which the proverbial level Playing Field as we say is of supreme importance, and thats fair enough. I want to turn to just a couple more issues. Were going to return over, i think, just a little bit and that will be fine because were having such a great discussion he here. And youre in charge. We really are. As i said earlier i had to reschedule the conference because of that snow day that wasnt even so much show. I wish i would have added a couple more hours but we have what we have here. Now, i want to ask meredith talked about 5g and its promise and the anticipated benefits of support and thats important to paint that picture, and she also talked about and maybe others as well talked about some of the impediments from the local governments that may have an impact on the deploying of the infrastructure, to coin a phrase, this supports 5g. What i want you to do, meredith, really without necessarily reciting all the specifics of these impediments i know ctia has done a lot of good work, important work doing that. Just tell us because im going to ask the commissioner about this during lunch. Tell us how you think about balancing obviously the l ll localities have an interest, a legitimate interest in these questions of citing and the processes, review and so forth, but on the other hand, there are federal imperatives. How do you think about balancing those interests which both have merit in your own mind . I think what were trying to have people do is pick their head up and stop looking at it as an immediate Revenue Source and see it as a longterm revenue savings. Its going to bring so many improvements to our lives but to get there were going to have to cite hundreds of thousands of small cells. As i mentioned, randy, when youre citing something thats as small as a pizza box as opposed to a big tower we should be looking at different rules. Were not trying for preemgs. Were trying to work with the locals but what we need is greater access to streetlights and polls and we need that to be costbased fees and we need these procedures to be streamlined. Weve been working with a lot of states. I might have gotten this number wrong because im not sure whether the governor the texas signed the bill or not but we have had almost ten states right now pass legislation, and thats important for us. We are in 2017. Were planning on rolling these networks out. Talk to bob, but we were talking about the Industrial Areas by the end of next year, having real consumer growth out there by 2020. Thats not very long for now. We need this action. We need action now. And were looking to congress. Were looking to the fcc and were looking to state and local governments because its going to take all of that. Okay, im going to give you an opportunity here to make some real news, okay, for our reporters here. I saw in the budget act that was just released that in the fccs budget theres a line that suggests that theres going to be another auction by 2027 i think, and i know that sounds like a long time. I hope im here to see that one, but i know theres a lot of planning that goes into this and theres a long lead time, so i get that. All i want you to do is tell us when that auction is going to take place. Thats one year. And tell us which band. And thats it. Im not going to answer that question. Okay. See, i know how to get a short answer when i really want to. I wish i could give an answer to that question. I think its actually im being flippant but its a really serious question. We need to have a pipeline. We need to know when these auctions are going to take place. It takes a lot of time and planning. Weve had the 600 mega hurts auction. Its been a success. Weve got to get a pipeline ready. Were going to have five times more data by the decades end and thats an old number. I think all of your copanelists actually and most people in the room or many people in the room know from history actually how long it actually takes from conception to the actual auction. Okay, im going to ask one more question and then im going to give you some instructions for lunch. This question is to the chief justice. We havent talked about video regulation. You know theres so much more we can talk about, but thats an area at the Free State Foundation for many, many years its been my view that, you know, going way back because i can remember that a lot of the regulations on the books were put in place, you know, several decades ago if not longer, and that they just dont fit with the Current Media environment very well. And i think its my view that theres a First Amendment overlay to a lot of these regulations that ought to be important to be considered. So david, i just want to ask you, you know the changes that are taking place in the video space are, you know, amazing. Weve got netflix and all the other otcs and i think knenetfl has more subscribers now than any other video purveyor perhaps. A lot of video is consumed on these video on the mobile devices that merediths companies enable, so thats changing as well. And so my question is, and youre obviously at a position at comcast where you have the cable and broadcast properties. Just talk to us just briefly if you will about how that environment is changed and whether, i guess importantly, most importantly for this session today, how that impacts your view about the Regulatory Environment and the urgency or not of any changes that ought to take place. I think for all the reasons that you suggested in your question you dont hear a lot about regulation of video these days. There are a lot of people who think that the video business is a melting ice cube. We actually dont at comcast. Were very pleased with our video business, but blair talked earlier in commenting on merediths comments that competition is the ultimate surrogate for everything. Well, 99 of americans can now obtain multichannel Video Service from at least three multichannel video providers. 59 of america now subscribe to ovdss online video distributors. You dramatically understate the impact of netflix. Netflixs u. S. Subscribers are now almost 50 million which means that theyre more than twice as large as we are, and were twice as large as at t and we are, so we would be the largest multichannel video providers. You put at t, directv and comcast together, were not as big as netflix. And yet we still have this jungle of video regulations that were put in place in a completely different time, in a completely different environment and consistent with the Trump Administration and with the chairman of the fccs views that we should be looking at our entire Regulatory Framework and figuring out whats really necessary now to protect the American Consumer to provide choice. I think there are a spate of video regulations that could easily fall by the board making our legal and regulatory life easier and not impacting consumers, consumer choice, or Consumer Protection in any way whatsoever. I happen to agree. And again, i think theres a First Amendment overlay to a lot of those regulations. By the way, im sitting next to kim and she wouldnt forgive me if i didnt say this, but within this environment, i would also say that diverse and independent programmers are thriving, and their opportunities to get on the air through netflix, through online video distributors, through traditional cable providers, through satellite, theres never been a more robust environment for diverse and independent programmers as well. So we need to keep it going. No one wants to stop it from happening, but im just saying, sort of ticking off on argument that sometimes people want to make. We dont need this thicket of video regulations to protect the rights of independent and minority programmers. Okay. Well, as i said, we really could go on for a long time. I think this has been a terrific pan panel. We just learned so much. Theres more to keep talking about and im sure we will in the future. So dont move, but just join me now in thanking this panel. [ applause ] okay, we have to move on because weve got chairman pai with the lunch conversation starting really in a halfanhour. Heres what were going to do. Those doors are opening to my left there. Weve got a really weve got a nice buffet there. You know, this crowd is really fantastic. And i appreciate it. I have to say, i think some of you in the crowd probably didnt register. You dont have to raise you dont have to raise your hands. Were going to enforce that thing about if you dont register, you cant attend. Remember the last conference we did, we actually had to enforce it. But heres all im going to say. For those of you who didnt register, we want you to enjoy this lunch as well, but when you go through that line over there, and you know who you are, maybe take a little less, take a little less of those portions. So go so right now were going to start the lunch, go through the line, and please come back to your seats and have lunch because before you finish your lunch were probably going to start our conversation with chairman pai. Thank you very much. Okay, were going to get started again. If i could have everyones attention. Our chairman is probably much better than i am at getting everyones attention, so you can do that again if need be. Well thank all of you again for coming. Its a