Abby Vollmer, Michael Katz, Dane Jasper, Conor Kennedy, Ernesto Falcon, Victor J. Ruiz-Cornejo
Channel: San Francisco Public Library
Date: 2018-05-09

Github's Abby Vollmer welcomes Michael Katz, Dane Jasper, Conor Kennedy, Ernesto Falcon, and Victor J. Ruiz-Cornejo to discuss "Net Neutrality: Present and Future" as part of SFPL's Connect with Tech Week 2018. Ernesto Falcon is Legislative Counsel at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Conor Kennedy is Acting Deputy Broadband Project Director at the SF Mayor's Office of Civic Innovation. Dane Jasper is CEO of Sonic. Michael Katz is Sarin Chair in Strategy and Leadership and Director of the Center for Telecommunications and Digital Convergence at UC Berkeley Haas School of Business. Victor J. Ruiz-Cornejo is Deputy District Director for State Senator Scott Wiener. Moderated by Abby Vollmer, Policy Manager at GitHub, who made these opening remarks: "Abby Vollmer: Thanks so much, everyone. I did just want to give a little overview. First, just by saying what ‘net neutrality’ is. Sometimes it’s referred to as the open internet. Net neutrality in general is a principle that Internet service providers should provide fair access, not discriminate, not prioritize or favor certain content or websites or applications over others. There are many ways to achieve it, but I think in part because of the Federal Communications Commission’s 2015 Open Internet Order, I think a lot of people currently use ‘net neutrality’ as a shorthand for three rules that the FCC established in that order: one is no blocking, one is no throttling, and one is no paid prioritization. No blocking means that Internet service providers, or ISPs, can’t prevent you from accessing certain sites. No throttling means they can’t slow down your access to certain sites, or make them load more slowly. And no paid prioritization means no fast lanes, no allowing…providers to pay more money to get their content out to people faster. So those three rules are essentially what that 2015 order established. The FCC under the current administration has repealed that order. Right now, it’s being challenged in the courts, and we’ll see where that goes. There’s also a likely attempt in Congress to try and invalidate that order. Tomorrow, most likely, the Senate will schedule a vote for next week to try to invalidate that order. But to give you a sense of what that means in the bigger picture, even if that does pass it would go to the president and it’s not likely to survive a veto. So you may hear about Congress voting on this congressional review act bill, but in terms of what that would result in, it’s probably not going to be something that would change the current situation. You may have also heard pressure on Congress to write its own law about net neutrality. And in case that’s confusing, about the FCC making rules and the Congress writing laws, I thought it might be useful to just take a step back to the Constitution. You may remember that Congress is the branch that has the power to make laws. The Executive Branch, — the Federal Communications Commission is under the Executive Branch — is tasked with implementing laws. When Congress makes a law it can decide to delegate authority to create rules to implement that law to an agency. In the 1996 Telecommunications Act, Congress wrote that law and said ‘the FCC can issue rules to help implement this law.’ Over the years the FCC has done this and written several policies and orders related to broadband… but when the FCC initially addressed broadband, it said ‘We’re going to classify it as an information service under this 1996 Telecommunications Act.’ Information service went along with not much regulation. Over the years leading up to 2015, the FCC decided it wanted to more heavily regulate broadband services, and ultimately classified broadband services as a telecommunications service, which is Title II of the 1996 act. Now, when the FCC and the current administration repealed that order, they said ‘Broadband is not a telecommunications service; we shouldn’t be regulating that very heavily. It’s not like a utility, it’s not like a common carrier; it should be lightly regulated.’ Whatever happens with the FCC’s order, if it survives, whether Congress writes new rules or not, one other layer to think about is that the FTC, the Federal Trade Commission, also can come in as a way to enforce if an ISP were to engage in unfair or deceptive business practices." I work for a company called GitHub; I do policy there. GitHub is a software development platform. It’s where most software developers write, share, test, collaboratively develop their code. Even if you haven’t heard of it, many of the applications, website products, etc that you use are built on GitHub. GithHub is very much in favor of net neutrality and those rules."