Transcript

The Internet's Future: Will it be Free?

May 26, 2011

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You’re listening to an archived version of the PDF Network call featuring special guest, Nancy Scola, Tech President.com’s Associate Editor on the subject: The Internet’s Future: Will It Be Free?

The call was recorded on May 26, 2011 and is presented here in its entirety. For more information on the PDF Network and upcoming calls, please visit PersonalDemocracy.com.

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MICAH SIFRY: Hi everybody, this is Micah Sifry from Personal Democracy Forum and you are listening to the latest installment of the PDF Network conference call. These are calls we do every two weeks with movers, shakers, thinkers, innovators in the political and technology space.

And today -- and I should mention by the way, thank you to our sponsor, AT&T for their long-time support for these calls.

Today we have a special treat. We’re going to turn inward and we’re actually going to spend the hour with our own Nancy Scola, Tech President’s Associate Editor on the topic of the Future of the Internet: Will It Remain Free? or with all the battles over net neutrality and broadband access and online speech, privacy, what is happening to the future of the internet and how can we preserve it?

I should mention that while most you probably know Nancy from her writing for Tech President for the last three years, she’s also a bona fide policy expert, she was in one of her past lives worked for Henry Waxman on Capitol Hill specifically on tech policy, also worked for the Mark Warner Presidential campaign, much beloved long-lived Mark Warner (inaudible) in a similar role, and she has written widely on this topic, in particular you can find some of her more wonky writing when she isn’t doing it for Tech President at the American Prospect. So, it’s really a treat to have Nancy with us.

One more word before we dive in, which is as usual the first half of the call will be Nancy and I in a conversation and then about half way through, I’m going to sort of open the phone lines as it were and invite folks who are listening to join in.

Of course, you are welcome to Tweet about this. Use the hash tag PDFNetwork and I’ll be monitoring those Tweets if there’s a question or a comment that comes in there to interject.

And the last brief plug, if you have not already signed up for PDF11, our conference is coming up literally less than two weeks away, June 6 and 7 in New York. We are almost sold out, so if you have been delaying and thinking that you might decide at the last minute, well the last minute has arrived and we would hate for somebody to not be able to come because simply you forgot to get your tickets in advance.

So with that, Nancy I’m going to turn it over to you to really set the stage for us. I mean, this is a topic that we talk about a lot but you really -- when we were looking at the various things that we do these calls on -- suggested that it really would be worth diving in on this question on the future of the internet.

So, first give us some history I mean because when we talk about the development of the internet, it’s gone through some stages. So, help us understand how we got to where we are now, first.

NANCY SCOLA: For sure. So, I think we’re at a particularly interesting time in the future, this bigger conversation about the future of the internet. It’s an interesting time and a potentially scary time. And it’s a time that I look at as kind of the third wave of big decisions that have to be made in the history of the internet, right?

So, the first wave I think you can make the case for is that back in sort of the 70s and 80s, the big decisions that were being made about the internet were being made by guys like Vint Cerf, right, and the folks at (sounds like: ARPIDA), making decisions about how the internet was going to be open, how the internet was going to be this sort of interactive, interconnected series of networks. And these really core technological decision that these guys were making with a little bit of guidance from bureaucrats, right? So, it’s mostly engineers making technological decisions about openness with a little bit of input from government, so that’s the first wave.

The second wave I think you can argue is that happened in sort of the mid 90s, which was when the Clinton Administration really kind of looked at this burgeoning internet and said, “Hmm, there might be some money to be made here. The economy could use a little bit of a boost. How can we make this burgeoning internet a safe space for commerce?”

And so they really kind of reached out to academics and engineers that had been putting this thing together and the folks in the Defense Department certainly, and said, “How do we make this a safer space?” So, they set about creating something that eventually became known as iCan, which is the non-profit that really kind of makes the planes run on time on the internet by figuring out the naming and numbering convention.

So, those were decisions again that the engineers had a lot of input into but it was really -- that was when bureaucrats kind of really got more involved in that conversation. You know, there was a little bit of outreach to world government, France in particular kind of had some input into how those decisions would be made. But it really was a very small group of people making decisions about the future of the internet.

So, the third wave of decision making I think we’re actually right smack in the middle of today. And these are decisions that have to do with how the internet is going to serve -- you know, there’s two billion people that use the internet right now, which is just an amazing number if you think about it. It was the Clinton Administration, when they were really making decisions about how this thing was going to function and now we have two billion people around the world that are using it.

So, the decisions that are being made right now are about how the internet’s actually going to serve those two billion people. These are decisions about what the civic nature of the internet is going to be in the future, how open is it going to be, how successful is it going to be and what is the nature of the relationship going to be for people that actually like plug into this thing and make use of it.

So, these are decisions that again, the engineers have a role. You could argue that bureaucrats have a role, more world governments actually taking an active role in those conversations.

But I would make the case that really if we want the internet to reflect the diversity that we’ve come to associate with the internet, it really has to involved a much wider number of decision makers. Maybe that’s not the two billion people that are using it now, but it’s got to be a bigger conversation than just the core folks that have made those decisions thus far.

So, that’s sort of like the third wave argument, right? Just maybe a potentially useful framework for the (inaudible) how this stuff works.

MICAH SIFRY: I was just going to ask to what degree you would in laying out that framework, how much of the future of the internet is let’s be vulgar about it, still in American hands. And in whose hands, right?

I mean, is it government? Is it private companies? Some of the debate that we’re going to talk about seem to me very much centered on decision makers either in Washington or maybe in silicon Valley and some are perhaps elsewhere, like in the European union.

So, how much of the future of the internet would you say is still in American hands and to what degree is that either a good thing or a bad thing.

NANCY SCOLA: Yeah, I think you can make the case that it’s still very much in American hands, but it’s not the bureaucrats in the way that it once was. It is much more sort of centered in Silicon Valley.

So, the Clinton Administration pushed to make the internet a safe place for commerce succeeded really, really well. And people sort of made a lot of money off this medium. We’re seeing these decisions now being made and I hope to talk about this sort of -- the emergence of platform sites, which are these sites that we’re funneling so much of our discourse through now, which is -- you know, whether it’s Facebook, Google, YouTube, Twitter, all these sites, right?

So, you really have folks there making day in and day out decisions about how the internet’s going to function.

MICAH SIFRY: Okay. So, what are the key fights that are most critical to shaping the future?

NANCY SCOLA: Yeah, so there are kind of five that I was thinking about when I was thinking through this call.

The first one you mentioned is this net neutrality debate, which is about -- to really simplify it it’s just about whether the people that control the networks, they now own the networks, are going to be able to discriminate against or privilege content that flows across their networks.

This is a big fight in the US over the last couple of years. The latest there is as most folks probably know is that in December the FCC issued a set of rules that enforce most of what neutrality advocates were looking for when it comes to wire line broadband, so the actual -- you know, the lines that we’re connecting -- that many of us connect to say from our homes or at work even if we’re connecting to those networks wirelessly, it’s still a wire line connection to the internet.

So, they enforce a lot of the neutrality provisions when it comes to wire line where a lot of neutrality advocates think that they went wrong, that they very lightly regulated the wireless space. So, a lot of the neutrality regulations that apply to wire line are not going to apply to wireless, which has folks a little bit worried.

Even those set of rules that the republican Congress -- and Congress have been very aggressive in pushing back against, the argument there is the FCC is really over-stepped its authority, which is potentially and argument that has some legal merit. So, they’re really kind of making that case. That probably won’t go anywhere, just considering the way that the Congress is structured at this point.

But companies like Verizon particularly talked about fighting this out in court, so this -- the next couple of years are going to be really sort of the neutrality fight is maybe -- might settle out a little bit and it’ll probably happen in court.

MICAH SIFRY: But as a practical matter for the next few years, does that mean that we still have net neutrality embraced at least in terms of land line connections to the internet? Or is there still something to worry about at that point in the discussion because it --

NANCY SCOLA: Yeah, I think it’s probably fair to say that we kind of don’t know what’s going to happen. What’s going to have to happen is that company, some internet service provider is going to have to do something that seems discriminatory. And people are going to have to press it at the FCC and see how the FCC comes down and -- you know, it’s one thing for the FCC to issue some rules and it’s kind of continuing what had been the status quo.

And the argument that the providers -- the network providers always said that we’ve no reason to discriminate because we’ll lose customers if we do that. So, their argument was, ‘we don’t need these rules because it’s in our best interest not to discriminate on content.’

So, we’re going to have to see as more and more people are doing more and more on the internet, so it’s not just web surfing, I get my television through the internet now. So, as they start rolling out new products it might potentially be competitive with core internet products and people start to say, ‘hey, that’s a violation of neutrality.’ The FCC at that point is going to have to make some (inaudible) decisions that will see what neutrality they’re actually willing to enforce.

MICAH SIFRY: (Overlapping remarks) Yeah, we don’t really know but yeah, we don’t quite know yet but the odds aren’t great at this point and the President who said he would take a back seat to no one in fighting for net neutrality is somewhere in the back seat.

NANCY SCOLA: Yeah, I mean the problem with net neutrality is it’s actually a really complicated issue that’s been presented in very simple ways.

So, the red flag is never going to be Comcast blocking a competitor’s website. It’s going to be privileging a few packets late at night when traffic’s really high, right? It’s going to be making very sort of nuanced decisions and does that violate neutrality or is that good network management, which is something they’re completely free to do under the law.

It’s not nearly as black and white as it has been presented. So, we’re really going to have to dive into those details. What is the nature of this neutrality that we’ve been given?

MICAH SIFRY: But the main owners of the pipes have been pretty vocal about their right to make lots of money from the traffic moving through their pipes. And at the same time some of those companies are also turning into content owners big time, right?

NANCY SCOLA: Yes, absolutely.

MICAH SIFRY: And so the argument that one of the problems with thinking about this is just the issue of net neutrality is that there could be other concerns about concentration of ownership because it’s really a natural thing. I mean, if you own the pipes, you’re Comcast and you also own NBC, which a lot more than one TV channel, the temptation to favor your contact, bundle it in various ways, there’s all kinds of issues there. That has little to do with net neutrality, but it definitely has something to do with consumer choice being limited and people taking advantage of the internet, the power they have over the pipes to take advantage in privileged content.

NANCY SCOLA: Yeah, I mean it actually in some ways is entirely to do with net neutrality because the argument that they’ve always made is in order to offer a better quality of product, we have to have the ability to manage our networks as we see fit.

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In the past that had been okay, network shaping in terms of -- at different times of day, people are using more traffic, we can look and see those bits and kind of route them in ways that are more beneficial. They can also sort of make the argument of we need to offer a better quality of video product and since we know the system inside and out, right, we’re Comcast, we know the tubes; we’re NBC/Universal, we know the content. In order to offer a better quality of product to people, we can sort of -- you know, sell our packets one way or the other.

And where it particularly becomes worrisome is in this mobile space because they’re entirely allowed to create applications that they can send traffic directly to. And they will make the argument again that we are just you know, look at the amazing product you get that you can now watch on your iPhone like this incredible programming, you know? That’s the question of okay, that’s not pure and simple discrimination, right? What it really gets to the heart of is the internet a balanced playing field for future innovators?

So, it might be that we kind of have to re-orient this whole conversation about net neutrality that it’s not just about discrimination and privileged content. It’s really about what the intention is at the end of the day.

MICAH SIFRY: Yeah, and I also -- this goes beyond the range of where we need to go with this call but what little I understand from people who actually know something about the physics about how you move packets around on fiber optics and so on suggests that there may be another issue which has to do with whether the main pipeline providers are actually creating artificial scarcity and that the lack of competition that you know, in effect what Clinton allowed to happen is a situation where these companies are really in a position to rip people off. But we have no way of knowing how bad our broadband really is.

I mean that goes to the second piece of this which is, is part of the future of the internet connected to the difficulty in really improving broadband service in the United States because there’s so little competition, there’s so little incentive to do it.

NANCY SCOLA: And one of the responses of the Obama Administration has been sort of a core Obama response and that has been to focus on transparency. So, as part of the national broadband plan, a big part of that is focusing on informing customers exactly what the nature of their internet connection is, how fast it is, what they’re paying for, what they’re actually getting. That sort of thing.

It’s also part of net neutrality is if you’re going to shape a network in certain ways, you have to be very, very open about it, right?

The worry is that it’s a little naive to assume that because customers now have more information about the nature of their connection that’s actually going to empower them in a meaningful way.

MICAH SIFRY: Okay, well you’ve mentioned five areas that we wanted to cover so I want to make sure we get to each of them before we reach the midpoint of our conversation.

So, what’s up next for you?

NANCY SCOLA: So, the second one is really the intellectual property fights, which I think is the next big thing that is going to be in the spotlight.

So, in particular in the US the debate has been recently about domain names seizures, right, which is sort of DHS or other law enforcement going in and actually getting domain registrars to delete website entries. So, the website still exists, they’re just deleting from the sort of (inaudible) system on the internet, their entry.

And something that people have been pretty concerned about because it actually calls into a law enforcement capacity this layer of the internet that makes the base internet function. So, I type in an IP address and that would re-direct to like Google.com, that’s only possible to run an internet where people have to remember the IP address for Google, right?

So, this is a system that has actually made the internet function really, really well. It’s function of the internet that the US has had a privileged role in maintaining, so (inaudible) is this non-profit that’s based in California, has sort of -- you know, you need a relationship with the US government, they’re in the role of maintaining this sort of naming convention.

And the US has kind of been given the freedom or the privilege to run that aspect of the internet and you can see if they start really playing out these domestic law enforcement battles over intellectual property. I mean it’s certainly global but in the US it’s been going on for years and years, the battle in the recording industry and the motion picture association of America against sort of copyright infringers.

You can see them now sort of trying to say, ‘hey, we have a unique way of kind of going after these folks, let’s use the internet sort of functional level.’ Maybe folks around the world kind of start saying, ‘hey, maybe the US shouldn’t be in the role that they’re in.’

So, that’s -- in the US the big focus now is there is a bill called the Copyright Online Infringement and Counterfeit Act. That bill came out last year, there was a lot of pushback