Cspan was created as a Public Service by americas Cable Television companies, and is brought to you today by your paper satellite provider. [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2017] host in your code of ethics statement you write i am not an objective news reporter. Im in opinion columnist. Walt right. Host what does that mean . Walt i am like a movie reviewer. They are not objective. You dont look at the movie reviewer to read an objective business story about the studio. You go to read someones opinion about whether this is a good movie. Whether this actor did a good job or a bad job. Whether aaron sorkin did a good job writing it or david finch er did a good job directing it. I know people who avidly read a reviewer and then do exactly the opposite because they know they are going to disagree. I know other people who swear by this book reviewer, this television reviewer and follow their advice. That is what i have done most of my career. I am also a commentator. When i choose not to review a i often instead comment on an issue. The future of the internet, the behavior of the fcc. What google ought to be doing. What microsoft ought to be doing. What apple ought to be doing. Those are all opinions. These are all subjective. I say that specifically so people will understand. In the Media Business gets this distinction. I realized, most of us have, lots of readers dont get the distinction. I stated it up front. It doesnt mean i am in any way infallible. Im inviting people to say, you are completely wrong. Here is why. If they do that in a civil fashion, i might even respond and we can get into a discussion. Host as a lot of people read you regularly, who do you read regularly . Walt in tech . I read theres too many. I read almost everybody that i work with as often as i can. On any given day, we have 70 or 80 people writing or doing videos. It is probably impossible to read every one of those. I read most of them. I sometimes read them before they go into print. I go before they going to the website. I read everybody at wecode. I read our competitors. Some of that ive read for competitive purposes. You want to know what your competitors are doing. A lot of that i read because they are smart. We are smart, they are smart. There are competitors i dont consider very smart. Probably dont read them. Im not going to name names. But i will read the tech coverage of the most Important News on tech. It takes a lot of time. But i learn things. Im interested in text line interested in the approaches of different people. Tech, sonterested in im interested in the approaches of different people. Host in a recent column you wrote about Tech Companies that we have now in Consumer Tech and oligopoly. An oligopoly. Walt we do. Host expand on that. Walt speaking from the Vantage Point of somebody who is about to retire, who started writing about tech when i was 44, i was already pretty old. I had done 20 years of nonsubjective straightforward washington reporting. I can tell you the first year i started as a tech columnist, if you looked at pc magazine, the biggest deal at the time, they had an annual issue where they reviewed each of the computer manufacturers whose products you can buy in the u. S. There were 72 or 75 of them at that time. There was no internet. There were very few companies. There were some software companies. Very few companies did services and web things that we think of now. No facebook, twitter, itunes. None of that stuff. They were reviewing Computer Companies. There are very few Computer Companies now. Fewer than 10 that matter, that sell any significant number of computers. Beyond that, when we take into account those other things, messaging services, social networks, ecommerce, music, video. Youve got five big Platform Companies on which all of those services have to be built. Amazon, google, apple, facebook and microsoft. So there are a lot of people who read my columns, never go to the verge. Or wecode. My column runs simultaneously on both of those websites, which have common ownership. The column runs there. Its on the homepage. 10 years ago we would have talked about visits to that homepage, all of the arduous thinking about how to what plays where. There is still some of that going on. But large numbers of people who read my column read it on facebook or apple news, or searching on google. It pops up. Our technical teams, thank god for them by the way, our product teams, have figured out a way following the specs published by apple and google and facebook to make our columns work there. Make them load quickly and appear nice. That is one small example. Facebook is a media company. It is a publisher of video, of audio, of text. People may not even go to the verge and read my column. They read it on facebook. Apple makes this possible making the iphone and the ipad. Google makes it possible through android. It has its own way of doing that. If you are netflix, which we know is very successful, and is doing entertainment, you are dependent on servers run by amazon and google. I havent double checked that it is probable. You are dependent on googles platform, android, apples two platforms, and microsoft platforms, windows and windows phone. Because people cant reach netflix through those platforms, there is no netflix to stream movies. You will get on roku. Even roku for its servers depends on one of these other guys somehow. So, we have an oligopoly. Im not saying they are conspiring. They compete with each other. In some cases they cooperate. But we have a oligopoly. Host you seem to lament that, and what it has meant to the smaller companies. Walt i think each of them in their own right are a great company. As we talked about earlier, i know the people that run these five companies. Companies. I know not just the people who run them, but people who run parts of them. Most of these people are trying to do the right thing. But they are very big and powerful and they have a lot of reach. One of the things about technology revolution, particularly in the United States in silicon valley, has been that Small Companies, they came up from the garage, from the basement, from wherever they were. And each of them was able to rise to scale. I think it is harder. As companies begin to come to scale, one of these big guys buys them up. Apple buys so Many Companies a year, for so little compared to its overall revenues and wealth, that the purchases are not under the law considered significant in dollars. They are not required to disclose them. They choose not to. They could, but they are apple. They are secretive. They choose not to. If you had a company and your company was working on one little aspect of artificial intelligence, an interesting angle, and you had 10 employees, and you were in oregon or israel, and they bought you, maybe they spent a hundred Million Dollars on you, which is appleof money, but not to they dont want their competitors to know that they now have your patents. Your engineers and expertise. They dont announce it. They announce if they legally have to. Like when they bought beats. A lot of Little Things they dont announce. The other guys are doing the same thing. I think it is a little harder for Small Companies to get all of the way to the end line and become a big company because it is very hard and sometimes refuse ampossible to very good offer. Host another column you wrote recently, lets treat the internet as a unique resource in a great common engineering feat. What does that mean . Walt that was this week, actually. That was me presenting a plan to save the internet, to preserve the internet from things like unfair promotion of one persons content over another. Because they have the money. Or because they are owned by the companies that own the pipes. The isps, or the Wireless Phone companies who are the same companies in some cases by the , way. To preserve your privacy, to make it possible for the small guy, to have a website that has a chance to do as well as the big guy. To make sure that the whole thing is a level Playing Field and remains open. My plan was we could have a big fight about the trump fcc versus the obama fcc, this particular ruling and that particular ruling. They go backandforth. There is a d. C. Whiplash. Then we have commercialization of the web. And overreach. Im a capitalist. I have no problem with people making money. I think there has been overreach. We have a lot of lousy advertisements. They disturb viewing experience on a website. They slow down the loading of the website and they track your every move. We need a way to deal with that. I propose we start over. We basically dont have the structures. The antitrust laws, the fcc, the ftc laws. They dont fit this situation. This is not the steel industry, which is a super important industry. But it is not like air. The internet is air. All of these other industries have to depend on it to live. So, i said we should think of it like the gettysburg battlefield, or the interstate highway system, which were bipartisan , as was their support, and most people are gladly have protected it. We should allow for economic benefits to flow from that. I talked about sending up a special kind of agency to hear cases around internet disputes. Host it looks like title ii is going to go away. Walt treating the isps as if they are title ii is gone. Is it a good thing . Not to me. Ii was a step in the right direction . Treating the isps as being covered by title ii, which unfolded the bunch of powers and obligations on the part of those powers was a good thing. But this gets to my point in this column i wrote. Are we going to treat them under title ii . We were going to do that. We are not going to be doing that under trump . Maybe the next president. It was not written for them. It was written for phone companies. It was a convenient way for the fcc to interpret the law and say we are putting you under title ii. What im saying is lets move beyond that and start a new approach dealing with this. Host one of the investors is comcast. You put that in your ethics statement. They are moving into the Wireless Phone business. Do you see that as a Revenue Source for them . Walt they are an investor. Between comcast and nbc, whichw. Comcast owns, i think they have 30 of fox. They dont sound like they call the shots. They dont get involved in our editorial, except to the extent that we have to footnote every time we mention them. That they are a minority investor. Just because of that doesnt because of that, thats doesnt make me highly knowledgeable about their business prospects. Like all of the Cable Companies they are finding it is more , profitable and a better way to focus your future to think about yourself as a provider of Internet Connectivity than a provider of content. Unlike some others, they have been serious about nbc operating as a strong content producer. Wireless phones, we can use more competition. We have four companies. I predict we will soon have three companies. I dont think the trump administration. Stop tmobile and sprint from finding a way to merge. If comcast can be disruptive, do something grow consumer, clever, proconsumer, clever, technically clever, from a business sense, challenge the established order all hail. , im all for it. If they are just going to do another service, they will make money. But im not that interested. Im more interested in whether it is enough to consumers. Host the director of our studio operations asks at what point are we going to see a crunch on bandwidth . We want bigger, better, faster. We have the spectrum sales going on. Is there going to be a crunch . Walt i already think there is a crunch. I assume he means wireless bandwidth. There already is a crunch in some circumstances. I think it got better for a while. When the iphone came out, partly because they were exclusive to one carrier, even if they had not been, i think the explosion of the uses of a phone that that represented over the first few years would have a tremendous pressure on the whole system. It was much worse. It was only at t. They just buckled. Then we had lt that came in, first with verizon, then with the others. That has helped a lot. Each of these cell towers has a cell tower that is definitely putting out the signal. Where is it getting that internet signal from . It is getting it from the bottom of the tower, there is a cable that connects into a landbased system and it propagates it wirelessly. All of that has gotten better. But it is tightening up again. But what is happening is we are moving towards 5g. 5g is going to be tested this year. Even though it has not been fully defined, which is crazy. It has not been it has not been named, has a low go, companies are testing it. Yet the International Bodies that need to figure out what is the actual technical basis for this, how do we decide what to call 5g and what not to, that has not been worked out. But part of the 5g technology is supposed to be a way to greatly increase capacity over the same spectrum. I have no idea if it will work. But people are hard at work trying to do that. I assume it will be done, maybe not to the maximum that they hope, but certainly to some degree that is discernible. Host you have been in washington for 40 years. Does washington and the bureaucracies get what is going on in the tech world . Walt no. Before the obama years i dont just mean because the obama people were super smart. The passage of time is part of it. Before the obama years, i think it was abysmal. The irony is the city, the metro area in washington are among the most tech savvy when they do these various polls. Among the most connected, are these users of sophisticated services. The populace here uses it. Some are the staffs and the middle levels of these agencies. Of the hill, white house, supreme court, all these places. Court, all these places. But the major officials, the average age and average amount of Time Available to learn this stuff on the part of senators and congressmen, cabinet members conspired against and the security requirements push you toward less sophisticated devices and services. All of those things conspire to make people who really are making our laws far less knowledgeable about this than many small business, big business individuals, consumers in the country who are living digital lives, whose income and livelihood, and daytoday existence depends on getting this in a sophisticated way. Eggerton, Washington Bureau chief for broadcasting should techks companies build in backdoors to allow government to access information . Walt it is crossing the line. We could have another show on this. I will give you two reasons why. The first reason is that you nnot build and a backdoor he a backdoor for te governmentfrom the without it being used by the bad guys. It will get out. It just will. It always does. And then nobody is safe. The second reason, all of our Tech Companies, apple is the example that comes to mind. They had a public fight with the fbi about this. All of our Tech Companies actually make more than half of their revenue from foreign countries. Some of which do not have forms of government that are respectful of Civil Liberties or have the rule of law that we have. China is the best example. Im not talking about the aspect of china where the products are made there. Im talking about the aspect of china where there are hundreds of millions of people, enough to match the population of the u. S. Who are economically well enough to buy iphones and google phones, microsoft hardware. And china has said, i would not be surprised if india has also this, and i am almost a e russia has said this anything you give to the Law Enforcement authorities in the United States to help them, any backdoor, we need to be treated the same way. We are a lawabiding country. We have police forces. They need to be able to go after terrorists. They need to be able to go after criminals. If you are going to build as apple described it an fbi version of their operating system, they are going to have to give that to the chinese. Those two reasons alone are prohibitive. Host we started this conversation nearly an hour ago. You said you first see an explosion in tech in the next 5, 10, 15 years. Where do you see that . Walt we are in a lull, now. Where the smartphone is kind of matured. Where the laptop is dropping in sales, way below what was expected four or five years ago. There are new models coming out with small improvements, but there are no big jumps that i see in the next few years. However, all of these companies are investing enormous amounts of money in at least four big areas. They are all interconnected in one way or another. The most important is artificial intelligence. Which has some other Technologies Associated with it and necessary for it. Like Machine Learning and natural language. Understanding, all of these countries are doing this. You first saw it in theory on the iphone. Still pretty crude. There is cortana and windows. There is alexa and echo. There is google assistant. There are others. These are the beginning. I said to jeff bezos, are we in the first inning . We are in the first batter of the first inning. That is how early it is. The ceo of google said, it is at least a 10 year horizon to get to a place where these machines can understand us. I think of it as the starship enterprise. There is a computer that exists in the starship. It understands. You can have a conversation with it. Its knows everything. Honest to god, they all have watched star trek. This is what they are gunning for. Virtual reality. We have it in small amounts today. You have to wear a set of goggles and connect to a game console. That will change things. Augmented reality, where you can still see the real world. You cant in vr, you can in ar. Seen see you, but i can virtual objects. Then, everything to do with cars. That