FCC Chairman Ajit Pai joins Dave Rubin to debunk net neutrality fears, citing post-2017 data showing increased investment and startup growth. Pai outlines his regulatory philosophy of market-driven solutions over preemptive rules, noting the FCC manages infrastructure while the FTC oversees platforms like Facebook. He discusses deploying 5G to close the digital divide, updating orbital debris laws for satellite constellations, and passing "Carrie's Law" to improve 911 access. The conversation extends to AI-driven smart networks optimizing everything from remote patient monitoring to precision agriculture, raising concerns about job automation in sectors like trucking and law. Ultimately, Pai argues that unlearning legacy telecom regulations is essential for a future where algorithms manage complex systems rather than local human oversight. [Automatically generated summary]
I am thrilled to have you here, because I don't know that I've ever had a guest that probably has more power to do more things relative to the thing that I do than you.
So about 10 years ago, I was up in Hershey, Pennsylvania with my then girlfriend, now wife, and I love coffee.
I love Reese's peanut butter cups.
And I saw this giant mug and I thought, oh, this is the perfect mind meld.
And so I just bought it.
And at our FCC meetings, sometimes they would drag on for a while, and I'm an inveterate coffee drinker, so I just brought this mug down to our monthly meetings, started drinking out of it, and then John Oliver did the skit about two and a half years ago, mocked the mug, and ever since then, I'm always getting these emails, tweets, and whatnot, you know, you and your mug!
unidentified
I always think the mug was the innocent party, it's a collateral damage!
That's fine, okay, so there's a ton of stuff I wanna talk to you about, obviously.
I've never been more sure that either YouTube is going to completely crush this episode in the algorithm or make sure that everyone sees it to thus prove that they don't mess around with things.
So I wanna spend, obviously, a lot of time talking about tech regulation and all that, and a little bit about your history and what the FCC was set out to do versus what it does now, and all of those things.
But sort of broadly to start, how much time do you guys now have to spend I'm just purely the tech issues related to censorship rather than just pretty much anything else that the FCC has ever done.
We don't have authority to regulate some of the Silicon Valley tech giants, but in part because we do regulate, broadly speaking, the infrastructure of the Internet and issues like net neutrality, of course, have been at the fore for a couple of years.
So we do monitor a lot of these issues that have come up, and it's fascinating how much the conversation has changed.
When I started talking about this two years ago, it was thought to be sort of an outlier opinion to go after some of the Silicon Valley tech giants for some of the policies, or the lack of transparency in particular.
And now you see members of both parties in both houses of Congress, people on the campaign trail.
Average American consumer is saying, what's going on here?
We want more insight into how these companies are doing business.
And so, we spent a fair amount of time on that.
There are other issues, though, that occupy the lion's share of my time.
5G, closing the digital divide, attacking unwanted robocalls, doing those kinds of bread and butter tasks that the FCC has been entrusted with.
I still remember my graduation party after college.
My parents organized a A little party for me in my hometown, and one of my parents' friends came and said, oh, you know, that's okay.
Not everyone can get into medical school.
It's like a nice little pat on the back.
That's hilarious.
And so it's sort of funny.
Every now and then I try to explain to my parents what it is I do, and when I told them I was going to be nominated for this position by President Obama back in 2011, my mom's first three questions out of the gate were, is this a full-time job?
Does it pay?
And if it doesn't work out, can you go back to the law firm?
And even then, for a while, she wasn't sure what I did.
A couple years ago, I was in L.A.
for some meetings, and I was going to see Judge Judy, because I'm a huge Judge Judy fan.
And I told my mom on a Friday, hey, I'm meeting Judge Judy on a Monday.
She canceled all of her patients for Monday, flew down to L.A.
with me, and she got to meet the judge.
And she never told me afterward, but her friends told me, jeez, she's so proud of you.
You got her in to see Judge Judy.
Not getting nominated by the president, not closing the digital divide, it's Judge Judy, the highest court in the land, getting her into that courtroom, that was an accomplishment.
Okay, so as the guy in this role, can you explain a little bit about your just personal philosophy when it comes to what should be regulated, what should be completely left to the market, and where those two things kind of meet?
Yeah, so I have some basic principles that guide my work across these different areas that we've talked about.
Fairly simple principles, but I think they're important for regulators to keep in mind.
One is that markets, not preemptive regulation, have delivered far more value for American consumers over time.
And number two, the rule of law really matters.
Administrative agencies like ours can't just make it up.
The law has been set by Congress and enacted by the president.
Ultimately, we can't make a decision that doesn't have a grounding in law.
And third, and increasingly importantly in this field, we have to respect basic principles of economics.
Things might seem like great ideas, but if the cost-benefit analysis doesn't work, if the different economic principles that apply to our work aren't respected, ultimately, you'll have a very elegant plan on paper that ends up foundering on the rocks of reality.
So, we try to respect those three principles in everything we do, and it's not easy.
Oftentimes, they're going to make a lot of people unhappy, but our job At the end of the day, it's to deliver value for the American consumer, even when, or especially when, it might not be popular.
Does it strike you that your job, or anyone that's in government that has anything to do with regulation, that the optics of the job seem much harder now, where, you know, 30 years ago, it was like, okay, you're regulating the airwaves, there's a couple channels, you know, we're on our way to cable.
But if you do something, like, the pushback is only gonna be a certain amount, because It's just how it is.
You might get a letter in the mail or something like that, or some phone calls to your office, where now everything that you guys do, and almost anyone that's in the public eye at any level, it becomes like an absolute firestorm.
I think it does, and that's actually a very good point.
So I've gotten to know all of my living predecessors, save one, going all the way back to Newt Minow, who was President Kennedy's first FCC chairman from 61 to 63.
Wow.
Had lunch with him a couple of years ago and was talking about some of the things we're working on and how exposed the job was, you know, social media and cable news networks covering stuff and all the rest.
And he stopped me and said, I don't know how I could do this job now, because back in the 60s, you had three major broadcast channels, your local radio station, your local newspaper.
Pretty much it.
I mean, satellite hadn't really taken off yet.
Cable wasn't a real thing.
And so, it's just a very different job now, and that raises a lot of challenges.
Everything we do is going to be scrutinized, and there's going to be a lot of commentary about it.
And I think it's fair to say that the SEC is much better known now than it's ever been known before, and that does have some positive impacts.
I try to talk about the positive things we do as well, but there's no question the exposure for this position, for our agency generally, has made it a lot more challenging than it used How much does the sort of changing technology kind of affect what you do or sort of expose the way things were done in the past?
So like right now, for example, if we were doing this on television, whether it was network or cable, there's a lot of limitations to what we could say, the types of things we could show, things like that, versus we're doing this on the internet, we're on YouTube and podcasts, so there are some limitations, right?
Like we can't show porn or something like that, but like pretty much it's the Wild West out here.
So you guys have different rules depending on the medium.
You've put your finger on one of the central problems in communications policy is that Congress sets the law and that law reflects a snapshot of the marketplace in a moment in time.
And that snapshot, especially in the technology sector, very quickly becomes yellowed with age.
And so we hear constantly, for example, from broadcast TV companies saying, look, we're competing in the same space with Google and Facebook and other companies.
Who don't face the same legacy regulations that we have to deal with.
You need to change that.
Different sectors of the economy say the same thing.
There's always the problem of government trying to fit the square peg of the marketplace into the round hole of the law.
So the way I think about it, the thing I told my team from the beginning, and I've told them every day since, is think about where the marketplace is right now.
How would you construct a regulatory framework to deal with the marketplace as it stands today?
And to the maximum extent permitted by law, we should adjust our regulations, modernize them to reflect that marketplace.
And I rely on one of my favorite political philosophers, and I know he's somebody you've drawn a tremendous amount of wisdom as well, Yoda, who in The Empire Strikes Back when he's training Luke and Dagobah.
I mean, private property, very important, but Yoda, when he's training Luke and Dagobah.
Yeah, and so at one point when he's training Luke, he says, you must unlearn what you have learned.
And that is so true when it comes to Washington.
The regulatory impulse is so strong.
When you see an Uber or a Lyft, oh, that's a taxicab company.
Let's slap all the taxicab regulations on it.
Airbnb, oh, that's a hotel company.
Same thing in the telecom sector, too.
Let's try to shoehorn all these legacy regulations onto these new companies and to maintain those legacy regulations on the established companies.
My goal is pretty simple, to just modernize our regulations to reflect the marketplace we're in.
Unlearn what you have learned when it comes to telecom policy, and you'll unleash all kinds of innovation and investment that ultimately benefits consumers.
We don't want to disincentivize companies from competing and innovating, because ultimately, consumer welfare is at stake here.
You give me two hours of the last five minutes of Rogue One, two hours of just an onslaught, then I'm thrilled.
Let's not get lost there, because I sense we could probably do that for a couple hours.
So a lot of this is sort of just fighting the Washington machine, right?
The machine itself is designed to create regulation, right?
So they see something like Uber come out, now everyone loves Uber and it's changing the business, but now you've got all these interests with the taxi companies, and then suddenly you then have to fight the impulse to basically crush them too.
And there are two very powerful forces in Washington.
One is regulatory inertia, that it's very easy to maintain the rules on the books because they've always been on the books and they should always therefore be on the books.
But the other one is some of the entrenched interests that say, look, no matter any regulatory change is going to disadvantage somebody.
And so they will complain Those people who are affected will have a disproportionate voice, they'll be very loud about it, and so that's part of the challenge as well, to try to have the long-term value of a greater number of people in mind when we make our decisions.
So yeah, I have a lot of meetings every day that I'm in the office in Washington, and what often happens is people sit on my couch, very much like we're sitting here, and they'll tell me, Aji, you're doing a great job on this and that and this and that.
We are all in favor of this.
We are big free market advocates.
On this particular issue, there's one little tweak, and it's amazing how many times that happens.
I mean, I did a roundtable recently out on the road, and it was striking.
One of the biggest innovations we've introduced, we have a $10 billion subsidy fund known as the Universal Service Fund.
Typically, this consisted of cutting checks to rural telephone companies and saying,
"Vaya con Dios, we hope you build broadband networks "with this funding."
One of the major innovations I introduced about two years ago when I'd just gotten on board
was instead of just cutting a check, let's have an auction, a reverse auction,
where all kinds of companies using different technologies have to compete for this funding.
And there's a downward pressure on prices, it's technologically neutral, saves the taxpayer money,
yada yada, much more efficient at serving the cause.
I was doing this roundtable and they said, "We love all the stuff you're doing
"on the Universal Service Fund."
It might be helpful, though, to exempt us from the auction mechanism, 'cause it'd just be.
Because, look, I understand from their business perspective it makes sense, but my goal can't be to vindicate any private interest.
It is not to vindicate any private interest.
It's to uphold the public interest, and that's going to make people unhappy in many cases because many business plans might not survive or might not thrive in an environment where that kind of competition is embraced by the regulator.
So let's back up a little bit to your philosophy again, which basically you're saying free markets, you want them to do as much as possible, yet you're the guy that has to come in and give some regulation around the public good.
What do you think would happen?
So this is like sort of the purest libertarian approach.
What do you think would happen if just basically the regulations just all disappeared and just the free market just was allowed to do whatever it wants related to all of these issues around communication?
By the way, I'm going to move this because otherwise I realize that if we leave this the entire time, the amount of memes that will come out that you had an hour-long conversation with a Reese's bar on the table, I'm just going to... It's become the MacGuffin already in the interview for those film buffs out there.
But your question was about the lack of regulation altogether.
And I'm not one who says necessarily that we need to scrap everything.
For example, in terms of setting spectrum policy, it's important for us to coordinate among different government agencies and the private sector.
But I do think that it would be an interesting experiment in some of these areas if the government got out of the business.
I'll give you one example.
Back in 1975, one of my predecessors instituted a rule prohibiting newspapers and broadcast TV and radio stations from combining because that was seen to be detrimental to competition.
Does anyone really think in 2019 that local newspapers or local radio stations are the dominant force
in any particular market, especially some of the smaller markets?
I mean, I don't really think so.
So if we got rid of regulations there, I don't think it would lead to all this consolidation.
To the contrary, it would enable them to compete with the Googles and the Facebooks and the Pandoras
and Spotify's and others who are out there distributing information.
And so, to me at least, I think it's an interesting thought exercise.
And as that denominator, so to speak, grows, as more people start to compete in the same space, I think it's important for government to have an intellectually honest assessment of what competition is.
That denominator is much broader than broadcast radio, for example.
It's all those streaming services and podcasts and all the rest of it that people just want to consume information.
Information, honestly, is the denominator in many cases.
Yeah, so traditionally commissioners who are in the minority, so the FCC, I should have backed up, the five commissioners I mentioned, three of whom are of the president's party, two are of the minority party, the party out of power.
So I was nominated in 2011, confirmed in 2012 for one of the minority party seats.
And by tradition, going back a couple of decades, The Senate leader of the party out of power makes a recommendation to the White House on who those minority commissioners should be.
And so in my case, Senator McConnell recommended to President Obama, we recommend a cheat for this slot.
And so fortunately, I fell through the cracks and had good friends on both sides of the aisle and confirmed unanimously, so it wasn't an issue.
But it's a very interesting model of governance.
And I think a lot of the cabinet departments, of course, which is just out of a secretary, have a very different model where it's more of a single person in charge of the agency.
So how much then of your job is coordinating with the president?
I mean, do things really, so from what I can understand, it sounds like Trump is probably more in line with your philosophy around this, but does that even matter that much?
Did you see a big difference from when Obama was there to now?
And there are certain issues, especially when it comes to security, for example, or some spectrum issues where we have to coordinate with, say, the Department of Defense or the National Security Council, where we do work with White House and administration agencies all the time.
But one of the things that the president-elect told me when I interviewed for the job in January 2017 was I'm giving you this job because I believe you're going to do terrific things.
I'm trusting you with this responsibility because I know you'll execute as you see fit and we'll back you up 100% of the way.
And so that's been largely what it's all been about.
We've been pursuing a lot of different initiatives and they've been supportive, especially on things like 5G, where we think it's a national priority, not just an FCC priority, for America to lead the world in this next generation technology.
Because I think now in LA, in certain spots, I am seeing 5G.
It just pops up on my phone.
And I remember, you know, I was traveling a lot last year that certain cities, I would get it and I'd be like, whoa, I didn't even know this was a thing.
So how does that actually work when you guys are trying to build a nationwide network?
I've got to say, Mayor Garcetti has been a terrific partner on this issue.
Other cities have raised a few more roadblocks, but those cities that are forward-thinking, that want their citizens to benefit from 5G, are adopting this more modern approach to infrastructure deployment.
So, overall, I think the United States is poised to lead, but there are other countries too, particularly China, that would love to seize the lead for themselves.
And so we're in an implicit competition, I think, with many countries and regions around the world.
Yeah, so right before we started, we talked about this issue with how China deals with regulation differently, and there's strengths and weaknesses to it.
Can you explain that a little bit?
Because I think it's a really fascinating flip on the way we talk about a lot of these issues.
Beijing can dictate not just what policy priorities the government should follow, but also require all provinces, all localities to fall into line.
And so, of course, since they don't observe the same democratic niceties we do, In this case, they can simply fiat, we want to lead the world in 5G.
That means we're going to pick the companies that create the equipment and subsidize them, we're going to make sure that our wireless carriers can deploy at scale, they don't have to jump through these regulatory hoops, and we are otherwise going to take the steps necessary to free up spectrum and do the other things necessary for 5G success.
But there are, of course, some concerns for those who share democratic values, such as the United States.
Comparatively here, we have not just federal regulatory approval that's required, state and local regulatory approval that's required in many cases, but also under a longstanding system that the FCC set up many years ago, Any one of the 573 federally recognized Indian tribes also can have a bite at the regulatory apple.
So, one of the points I've made is that let's try to modernize that framework to say that there's a consistent level of regulation, especially if you're a smaller company.
You don't have the lawyers and accountants and appliance officers to jump through all of these four different layers of review.
And to the extent that capital is scarce and work crews don't have to be hired and networks don't have to be built, I don't want that innovative spirit to be directed to other parts of the world where you can deploy at scale.
And that's part of the reason why we've been trying to work with localities like LA to update that framework, to make it more streamlined and just easier and cheaper to build these networks.
So in effect, while China can just say, all right, we're doing this, and no local province can do anything about it, and while that may work for now, like it may make the process faster for now while you have to deal with local states and all that, in the long term, it probably hurts their ability to innovate because it's all coming from the top.
You guys have more of a slog to fight through now, but the hope is that you're creating the groundwork sort of to allow as much competition as possible.
And part of the reason why I want this regulatory modernization is not just to be able to compete with other countries, but also because we recognize, and this is one of the truths that hardly ever gets recognized in Washington, that heavy-handed regulation and multiple levels of regulation disproportionately affect smaller companies.
It's the larger companies that have the compliance resources They can jump through a lot of these hoops.
Sure, it'll cost them money, but they actually have the resources to comply.
We don't want to squeeze out some of the smaller competitors, and especially in the technology space.
We're trying to encourage a lot more companies to enter this space.
We haven't talked about space itself yet.
Satellite companies and fixed wireless companies and some of these newer companies, they might not be able to get off the ground if that regulatory framework is so onerous that they can't raise capital, they can't hire the lawyers, and they can never deploy a product.
Yeah, all right, so I'm obviously going to want to spend a lot more time talking about the pure tech side of this and the Silicon Valley side, which is not, as you said, everyone thinks it's sort of your job, but it's not quite your job.
But wait, let's just do the space thing for a minute, because it's really interesting, because it quite literally is the next frontier, if not the final frontier.
How in the world do you sit down with people And, you know, you have government people now trying to deal with the ideas that Elon Musk and all these people are coming in with.
We're privatizing a lot of the space stuff.
How do you even come to a basic place where you can say, well, you can kind of do this and I want you to be free, but we can't totally do that.
No, it didn't fall within our purview, but certain other things do fall within our purview.
So over the last two and a half years, we were the first administration to approve what are called non-geostationary satellite orbit constellations, NGSOs, but essentially a lot of satellites that are being launched by companies like SpaceX and OneWeb and probably Kuiper, Amazon in the future.
The hundreds, if not thousands, of these satellites in low Earth orbit, so not deep into space, but lower in the Earth's orbit so that they can beam Internet access services at a speed and a price point that would be comparable to what you would get from a terrestrial provider.
And my position here is very reflective of those principles we talked about from the beginning.
Instead of preemptively regulating, deciding, OK, you can launch, but all of you, no, we're not going to let you do it.
We're trying to pick a business case or a business plan that's going to work and letting them take the first crack.
We're taking a more market-based approach.
Let's allow all of them to launch at various stages using certain parameters for orbital safety and whatnot and see what happens.
Let's let the market, the aggregated decisions of consumers decide which one will succeed.
And some of them might.
You never know.
It could be a residential broadband product.
Some of them are very different.
They want to do industrial Internet of Things.
I met recently with a company that just wants to deploy 150 satellites around the globe and they want to sign up customers like,
say, the Department of Defense that has military all around the world,
and they just need essentially low bandwidth services just to let people know where the troops are
at any given point in time.
We want all of them to be able to succeed in space.
Yeah, so I assume you'd prefer that everything has some sort of time limit up there or something so that eventually it doesn't just become space garbage.
Yeah, that's one of the things we're thinking about is should there be a time limit, should there be a built-in technology so some of these satellites can de-orbit automatically after a certain period of time, or if there is a failure they will automatically de-orbit, things like that.
So ultimately we want to make sure that everybody can succeed in space in the long run.
Like I said, in any of these orbital slots, if you have debris, that's a generational problem, not just a multi-year problem.
How much of this is sort of long-term thinking, say, the way you would talk about the climate change situation, so it's sort of like, you can plot a certain degree, but no matter how much you plot other countries, I mean, you just referenced China, other countries are just gonna do things the way they want, and how complicated that makes your job?
So there is a lot of international coordination that has to happen, especially when it comes to orbital debris.
We're always working with some of the other countries' agencies to make sure that we're all on the same page.
And there are international organizations that Deal specifically with this in fact shortly coming up in Egypt there's a big quadrennial every four years they have this conference and to talk about spectrum issues and one of the issues is what spectrum should be available for satellite companies and so in that context we're always talking about being on the same page on things like orbital debris and spectrum allocation but I think you raise a really good point is that we could do everything correctly but
Other countries are looking to take the lead on things like artificial intelligence, machine learning, or blockchain, or quantum computing, and we don't have jurisdiction over all of it, but to the extent we can, we want to make sure we advance U.S.
leadership, because I do think that there are some first mover advantages to countries and to sectors that really show that they're willing to take the lead.
All right, let's take this back to this planet for a moment.
All right, let's really dive into the tech stuff because it's obviously near and dear to me.
Now, first off, can you explain how this is not fully your jurisdiction?
Because this is one of the interesting things where, I mentioned right before we started, you've got Elizabeth Warren on the left calling for big tech regulation.
You've got Tucker Carlson on the right calling for big tech regulation.
And it's like, all right, that's a strange, that's that little horseshoe thing that everyone's going, well, how did this end up happening that these two people want it?
They want it for very different reasons.
But can you first explain how this isn't exactly your jurisdiction?
Because I think everyone sort of thinks it is when they say government involvement.
Yeah, they often do think the FCC, and especially in the context of some of the more politically salient issues like net neutrality, they would.
So, in a nutshell, under current law, as Congress has set it forth for many, many years, the FCC has jurisdiction over the networks themselves, the guts of the networks.
We don't necessarily have jurisdiction, or we don't have jurisdiction over the content companies that ride over those networks, and so we don't directly...
I think that, obviously, these companies have thrived with a more light-touch approach.
But a couple of years ago, I did flag—before it was cool, I will note, by the way—I did flag the fact that consumers legitimately had some concerns, as did lawmakers, about the lack of transparency on how some of these companies operate.
We don't have insight into how Facebook orders articles on its news feed.
We didn't have insight into how Twitter might decide to organize Twitter moments or with
Google and YouTube.
We didn't have insight into demonetization and things like that.
And I said, look, we need to have consistent level of regulation across the entire Internet
economy.
It shouldn't matter whether you're a network operator or a content provider, for example,
when it comes to privacy.
As an online consumer, I don't care whether it's a network company or a content provider
that has my sensitive information.
I want that information to be protected.
And I called a couple of years ago for a conversation about how should we think about the tech sector, some of these tech giants that have been completely unregulated.
And now it's interesting to see, as you mentioned, people from across the political spectrum are reaching this sort of odd consensus that something needs to be done.
What that something is, I don't quite know, and it's up to Congress to say.
But it is interesting how the conversation has evolved over the last couple of years.
Is this becoming one of the weird ones that you sort of referenced before, where in a weird way, the big boys in the game, they kind of do want regulation now, because they know that they'll be able to survive.
Google's got a lot of lawyers.
But that the new guys coming up, once there's more regulation, they're gonna have to hit certain benchmarks to do certain things, and they just won't be able to do it.
And also possibly that the problems are now so huge, especially around free speech, that it's like, please regulate us, that way we don't have to think about the problem.
Those very same companies are coming to Washington and telling Congress, we need a federal privacy law in order to get rid of this patchwork of state regulation.
And I always say, under the well-established precedent of goose versus gander, you can't You can't have it both ways.
You have to be able to be intellectually consistent on this issue, and that's part of the reason why, on net neutrality, on privacy, on any of these issues, let's just have an open, intellectually honest conversation about how to establish a consistent level of regulation that protects consumers and competition across the entire internet economy.
Because you mentioned net neutrality a couple times.
Now, about a year and a half ago or so, when net neutrality disappeared, if you were paying attention to the mainstream take on it, this was it.
World War III was starting, the internet was over, nobody was going to get video, everybody was going to be throttled, corporations were going to take over.
So can you just, all right, can you absolutely, just for the people that really want like the cleanest, clearest explanation so we can clip this perfectly, what was net neutrality and what actually happened?
So net neutrality involves the basic question of how, if at all, should the FCC treat internet access?
Should it regulate it under what is called Title II, which was the 1930s regulations that were developed
to regulate Ma Bell, the old telephone monopoly, or should it regulate the internet under Title I,
the more market-based approach that governed the internet from 1996 until 2015?
My view is the market-based approach served us very well.
We got $1.5 trillion of network investment, companies like some of those that we've mentioned
becoming giants from startups, and consumers benefiting from all that innovation.
And at the end of the day, I look at the evidence that's in the record.
When we made our decision in December of 2017, I kept track of some of those predictions.
You're going to have to pay $5 per tweet.
You're not going to be allowed to post on Instagram.
One of my favorites, the Senate Democratic Caucus Twitter account said, the internet will work one word at a time.
Or one of my favorites, this is the end of the internet as we know it.
Well, fast forward to now, internet speeds in the United States on average are up over 50% Network investment in 2018 was up $3 billion, the second in consecutive increase.
More fiber was deployed in 2018 than in any year since they've been keeping records.
And venture capital funding startups set a record in 2018.
One wouldn't expect that if these internet service providers were, in fact, acting as a gatekeeper, choking off innovation.
And so to those critics out there, I would say the record is clear.
The internet is open and more open than ever.
And thanks to our decision, more people than ever before, faster than ever before, can hate tweet their favorite SEC chairman.
There was a lot of pressure on the other side, no question about it, and personal threats made against me and my family and even the agency itself.
There are people in jail today for threatening my family and the agency.
But at the end of the day, I really have the conviction that we were doing the right thing.
I've got a quote by my computer, and I see it every single day when I power up.
It is from Churchill back in the 20s.
It said, Hear this, young men and women, and proclaim it far and wide.
The earth is yours, and the fullness thereof.
Be kind, but be fierce.
You are needed now more than ever before.
Take up the mantle of change for now is your time.
And I know it sounds cheesy, but I really do try to embrace that ethos that you've got to know what you believe, and you've got to execute on that belief to the best of your ability and take the arrows that come with it.
Is it going to be popular always?
No, not at all.
I mean, I understand that a lot of people still are angry about this decision, but at the end of the day, I've got the long-term in mind, and the long-term is one in which the digital divide closes, everyone's connected to the internet, the internet is free and open, and that's the vision that we're going to continue to execute.
Do you think, just to sort of give the people that wanted to keep net neutrality in place, to give them the devil's due, let's say, do you think that it's just a fundamental misunderstanding of what companies do?
I mean, the fear seemed to be that if you don't regulate them in this way, that one company will slow down Netflix and the other one will speed up their own broadband service and all these things.
And there is some initial thought that kinda makes sense there, like you would wanna hurt your competitors if you're in several businesses, and you'd wanna help your partners, but that's not really how competition works, and I guess everything that you just laid out is sort of proof of that.
I mean, do you think that they just sort of fundamentally misunderstand economics or something like that?
I understand the concerns they might have in the abstract, but the two things I always try to emphasize to allay those concerns are, number one, I support Congress putting on the page in the modern era what the rules of the road should be.
I mean, it's a one-page bill, honestly, that Congress could pass tomorrow.
No blocking of lawful content on the internet.
No throttling of lawful content.
No anti-competitive, paid prioritization, transparency, make sure every internet service provider documents all its business and network management practices for everyone to see.
I've just outlined a 99% supportable bill, but that's never going to happen.
Have you, I'm sure you've heard about this sort of platform versus publisher debate.
That's probably the stupidest question I've ever asked.
I'm going to go out on a limb and assume you've heard about this debate.
So for me as a guy that wants as little regulation as possible, so I totally hear your philosophy on this.
The platform versus publisher one is starting to make sense to me.
This is a place where I could start seeing a need for regulation, because if you're just a platform, then you should have to do all the things that you want in your one pager.
But if you're a publisher, then you have those extra responsibilities.
Yet in a weird way, the platform, say Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, are behaving like publishers and not platforms.
And one of the fascinating things to watch from my vantage point is on Capitol Hill, you're now seeing Republicans and Democrats openly wondering, should we change the laws?
Should we hold hearings to examine how we should change the laws to accommodate this new understanding?
And everything seems to be up for grabs right now.
And I'm not sure how it's going to play out.
But that debate of platform versus publisher is something that I think it was pretty much unthinkable just five years ago, so I'm not sure where it's going to go, but we're certainly watching it.
Do you think it's possible that there are certain things that the government is just no longer equipped to handle?
Like that the power and the amount of information, the amount of technology that Google, let's say, controls right now is so awesome and unprecedented that the idea that a government regulatory commission could actually harness it, fully understand it, and fully guide it in the right way, that that almost is impossible?
That must be a pretty crappy thing to think about, I suppose, in your position.
But I mean, do you think that is possible, that these companies have grown in ways, like, the amount of power that Google has is way more than Ma Bell had in 1930, and government obviously changes much slower than a technology company can.
I think, I mean, I have to think about it a little deeper.
I would say the first cut, I do think the tools of antitrust and competition law are fairly well suited to deal with companies that may have market power.
I mean, these are well, you know, the standard oils of yesteryear could just as easily, that framework could just as easily apply to the tech giants of today and to evaluate whether or not they are posing any competitive threat.
What I would say is the central problem we haven't yet wrestled with is that the pace of technological innovation is quickening, if anything, and we're now rapidly dealing with not just laws that are out of date, but a Congress that in a regulatory structure That isn't equipped to deal nimbly with some of the challenges.
To give you one example, facial recognition technology.
I mean, you're now seeing a lot of people wondering, well, should we ban or should we regulate facial recognition technology?
How does it work?
Or cryptocurrency?
Is that you see regulators struggling with?
How should we think about this?
Is it another financial instrument that we should regulate under the old laws?
Or should we just come up with something new?
And across all of these different sectors, the pace is so fast that by the time we even understand what it is, It's just almost too late to pass regulations because the marketplace has moved beyond it.
So I think that is one of the central problems that we haven't yet grappled with.
That's why I'm so grateful to outlets like this one.
I'm telling you, as somebody, I mean, a lot of your viewers are probably much younger than me, but as somebody who grew up in the late 70s and early 80s in rural Kansas, there were very few ways to get information from the outside world, virtually none to get information translated from you, to get your voice heard.
And so to go from that, where we were 30, 40 years ago, to now, where essentially the internet has democratized speech in a way that is unthinkable, is incredible to me.
I mean, one example I always use is, I was the first FCC commissioner on Twitter back in 2012, and I joined, so my colleagues said, this is crazy, you shouldn't be doing this, but now it's enabled me to get the message out to people who are never going to be able to come to Washington or hire somebody to come to Washington on their behalf.
It's had a real impact on my work and my ability to get my voice out.
There are a few issues that I've championed that have been a result of people tweeting
at me and I learn more about the issue.
We end up taking action that helps, in this one case in particular, save lives.
The 911 calling system, we've improved thanks in part to a tweet I got back in December
So, December 1st of 2013, a woman named Carrie Hunt Dunn was living in Marshall, Texas.
She and her three kids went to visit her estranged husband in a hotel room in Texas.
As soon as she got into the hotel room, her husband started stabbing her, and her nine-year-old daughter raced to the hotel room's phone and started dialing 911, as everybody knows.
But the call didn't go through.
She dialed 911 once again, and one more time, and one more time.
She didn't realize she had to dial nine first to reach an outside line.
So this story made the local press down there.
Somebody tweeted the story at me, and I started reading up and I thought,
boy, what is, I mean, that may raise my antenna.
What's the situation of 911 calling around the country?
So two weeks later, I was on the phone with Hank Hunt, who was Carrie's father.
Talked to him about the situation.
A month later, I sent a letter to the CEOs of the top 10 hotel chains in the United States,
as well as the Hotel and Lodging Association.
A year after that, I stood next to Hank in Marshall, Texas, where we updated the American public
on the progress we had made.
And last year, I stood with Hank in the Oval Office as the President signed legislation named Carrie's Law,
after his late daughter, to establish no access code required legislation
that would essentially allow direct access to 911.
And so to me, at least, I know Twitter has been a plus and a minus for many, many people,
but to me, at least, that story, it really vindicates the power of an individual like Hank
to get a story out there and to affect meaningful social change.
So on an issue like that, which naturally it sounds right, like, because no kid would think that they have to, many adults wouldn't realize you have to press nine to get the outside number.
Did you get any pushback from the industry that was like, we don't want outside access or something like that?
I mean, what would be the pushback on something like that?
It was more, well, how difficult would it be to retrofit some of the old telephone systems or, you know, is the government going to mandate specific technology to be used?
And so I think they were generally very supportive.
And what I found in talking to some of the hotel owners and phone manufacturers, as soon as they became aware of the issue, They were more than willing to make a change.
In many cases, it doesn't cost any money.
It's essentially just flipping a switch, so to speak, in terms of software, and you get rid of that access code.
And to me, it's really gratifying.
Whenever I check into a hotel room now, I always look at the phone as soon as I put down my key.
And it's great to see, to reach emergency services, just dial 9-1-1.
And millions of Americans who check into hotel rooms will never know that the FCC, that Hank had a part in that.
It goes to that point you were making earlier, that the longer-term value that we delivered, even if it doesn't get attributed to us, it really makes me feel good to know that we made a positive difference.
The hate and the good and all of it, it's all kind of ramping up.
The censorship stuff and all of that.
Do you guys have anything directly to do with when people say that Russian bots were hacking the election and manipulating news stories and all of these things?
How much directly does that fall under your purview?
Can you talk generally, I think that's a good transition, to just like, what is the culture in Washington right now?
Not even necessarily with your job, but I think everyone's feeling this thing that just the machine kinda doesn't work anymore.
Everyone does everything on partisan lines.
You just mentioned that you try not to do that.
But just like, what is the culture?
As someone that lives and works in Washington, you know, you're part of a machine that, you know, Administration's come and go, you're still gonna be there.
And people are always talking about that sort of thing now, that the washing machine just always exists.
I have found that there's much more tribalism in Washington than ever before, and I do think it's, I'm not sure if it's a cause or an effect of the tribalism we see in our body politic, generally speaking, but I do find it distressing a lot of the times that some of the, A blowback I'll get on Twitter has nothing to do with me.
It's just, oh, you're part of the administration, so screw you.
Right, right.
That kind of knee-jerk tribalism.
And conversely, on the other side, too, if you're supporting one of the candidates on the campaign trail, screw you, too.
I don't want to have anything to do with you.
And so that kind of ethos has permeated Washington to some extent.
It's unfortunate, because I do think that at the end of the day, there are certain things that we did have a consensus on.
I mean, even the free market principle, it was not that long ago that I think we had Is that the most shocking one to you?
To me, we're debating things that have led to all of the success that we all live in right now, and we're suddenly just tossing it up there as if these things should be debated.
It would be a close second, I would say, to free speech.
That's one of the issues that I think I've often said it distinguishes American democracy from virtually any other society in the world today, or even in history.
I always say that free speech is not just the cold guarantee that's on the parchment of the Constitution.
It's also a culture that emerged for many, many years with great sacrifice.
If you have a view that is opposed to mine, the tradition, of course, was that saying misattributed to Voltaire, I may disagree with what you say, but I'll fight for your right to say it.
Increasingly, we see that, no, people want to wall off the public square.
In fact, push people out of the public square altogether.
If there's a dissimilarity of views and that is something that's extremely dangerous to this country.
Have you thought of one of the interesting ideas that I've heard related to just backing up to the platforms themselves is that since these are private companies that it's almost like let them do whatever they want, basically, but that then the government could actually get involved in creating a platform.
That would respect all of the laws of the United States, and that would be an interesting use of government money, because it's like, oh, alright, Twitter can do what they want, YouTube can do what they want, but what if the government actually just had a platform that as long as you're abiding by the laws of the United States, basically you were allowed to be on there, something like that.
I guess two of my concerns would be, number one, the government, generally speaking, is not well positioned to own and operate a platform like that.
And the second one would be, as we saw with the debates over the Fairness Doctrine in the 1970s and 1980s, that doctrine was misnamed precisely because it empowered government officials to decide, to essentially assign points based on what side of the political ledger you were on.
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And that is the kind of thing that I would have to worry about.
The Fairness Doctrine, we're going to have everybody's ideas be out there equally, but at the end of the day, if the market doesn't, if some people just don't care about your ideas, why should the government be propping you up?
If somebody tells me, oh, this service or product is free, well, sometimes the only problem with free is that it costs too much and you have to always look at the fine and so too when it comes to free speech issues.
So I do think that that's one of the issues I'd have to think a little more deeply about,
I mean, so when I travel around the country, and I've now been to all 40 states in the continental U.S.
and Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, and you meet people who are just trying to put food on the table, work hard, and raise their families, You get a sense of that bedrock understanding of America's commitment to free speech is still strong.
But my God, when you see some of these controversies emerging on college campuses, on internet platforms like Twitter, it does make you worry.
Are we going to have a generation of leaders that is committed to that ideal?
And I don't know.
I mean, I hope so.
And I think it does rub a lot of people of goodwill on both sides the wrong way to know that There are certain correct views and only those views should be heard in the public square.
Because one day your views might be viewed as incorrect.
So I do, I don't know, I guess this might be the Naive Kansan in me, but I really do feel optimistic that that instinct that runs deep in the American psyche is going to win out in the long run, but there are some very determined opponents on the other side, to be sure.
So we talked about a couple of the future things here, so we're building this 5G network, we talked about space a little bit, but just to wrap us up nicely, what else should we be thinking about?
What are the other things that are on the horizon for you guys that maybe the average person isn't thinking about, that if we started thinking about a little more clearly, We wouldn't be in the, oh, net neutrality's going away, the world is gonna end tomorrow.
This sort of Pavlovian bribing is going to get you nowhere, my friend.
I think in conjunction with the great work we're doing on 5G and closing the digital
divide, the one thing I would flag for people is how that interacts with artificial intelligence
and machine learning.
The networks of the future are going to be smart networks.
It's not going to be a person operating locally, managing a network.
It's going to be software using algorithms to decide how best to optimize that network.
And one of the things we've been doing, we just held the first ever forum in the FCC on artificial intelligence and machine learning last December, and I've been working with a lot of entrepreneurs on this to try to figure out what is the future?
How is this going to, not just the automation of jobs, but how will it make us smarter?
For example, if you're talking about wireless sensors that patients might wear, even when they're not in the hospital, And those sensors could transmit at very low bandwidth
amounts of information, your vital signs and whatnot.
And an algorithm could analyze it very quickly to determine if a healthcare provider needs
to intervene quicker.
That's the kind of thing we're looking at in the future.
Or same thing when it comes to even things like precision agriculture, believe it or
not.
Incredibly connected farms that are going to require AI and machine learning tools to
figure out by the square foot, where do we need to apply fertilizer and where don't we
need to apply fertilizer.
I mean, across all of these industries, AI and machine learning is going to have a huge
transformative effect.
And I don't know what the future is, but I do think it's important for us to think about
And I didn't mean to gloss over the automation factor.
That's another thing as well that I hear some concern about.
If you're a long-haul trucker or even a lawyer or a pharmacist, increasingly those jobs are getting disrupted.
And I do think it's important to have a conversation about the future of work.
That's not necessarily the FCC's bailiwick, but I do think it's a larger social phenomenon that some people are worried about, some people are optimistic about, and I'm not sure where the conversation will go.