Welcome. We're delighted today to have with us Chris Riley who comes to us from Free Press, a DC advocacy organization. The talk today is co-sponsored by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society and the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology. And a lot of what Chris is going to be talking about today is related to topics that both the Berkman Center and Jolt have addressed in the past. The Berkman Center has been very involved in issues like network neutrality and helped in an FCC public hearing on the matter which occurred in Ames courtroom a little while ago. I'm sure you'll mention that as you're discussing it. And the journal has also published some of the leading scholarship on the issue and so we're delighted to be co-sponsoring Chris here today. Chris comes to us as I said from Free Press. Before that he spent some time at the FCC and I originally met Chris, I think it was at Yale when he was finishing his law degree and among other things editing the Yale Journal of Law and Technology and a fellow at the Yale Information Society project. So today he's going to tell us both about in general what it's like to do advocacy in DC and tell us specifically about some of the leading issues related to the internet and internet governance. And with that I'll turn it over to Chris. Thanks. Thanks Steve. It's this thing on. I don't know hopefully it's recording at least. As Steve said my name is Chris Riley. My title is Policy Counsel at Free Press. Free Press is a nonprofit nonpartisan organization. We actually pride ourselves on the fact that we don't take any money from corporations so we remain a little bit above the fray. There's a large world of non-profit organizations in DC that take a lot of money from AT&T and Verizon or even the tech companies but we just take money from individuals and from foundations. And Free Press started as a media reform group. You'll see some of the stickers I brought in. Actually both of the stickers I brought in are about media. Free Press started in 2003 to fight ongoing efforts at the Federal Communications Commission to loosen the rules on ownership of media stations. So Free Press started to fight the growing conglomerates of media companies and over the years Free Press has maintained a lot of work on media but has transformed itself as well into a group working on internet policy issues out of the realization that in many ways the future of media is the internet. And if we don't have an internet which is open and free and available to everyone the media just won't be the same. So Free Press has been doing a lot of work over the last three years on network neutrality which is part of my talk. We've also worked on every other issue involving high-speed internet including the stimulus bill which just came out of compromise on the Hill yesterday and also on broadband deployment on information gathering and a lot of other issues like that which I'm happy to talk to you more about after this or at other times but this talk is just going to be about DC and about net neutrality. I wanted to start off the talk by discussing the the feel of working in DC and in telecommunications because I know a lot of you probably almost all of you are students if not that fellows and you're sort of looking ahead and thinking about what do you want to do with your degree when you're done and I tried a couple different things when I was in law school. My first summer I did an internship at the electronic frontier foundation which is well known to everyone involved with the Berkman Center I'm sure and my second summer I did a gig at a law firm which was okay but I knew I didn't want to do traditional law I knew I didn't want to write briefs I knew I didn't want to argue cases and I knew I didn't want to do taxes for companies or anything like that and so I wanted to go to DC and to be involved in policy work I really wanted it sounds sort of cliche but I wanted it I wanted to make a difference you know and I know a lot of you here are still sort of getting over that or still feel that way and and I feel like the best way to make a difference that matters in areas of communications and technology policies to go to DC that's where everything happens it's it's there's a reason the world is different inside the DC Bellway and there's a reason you hear comments about that often sardonic in nature but it's true it's just a different world there there are a lot of really big players in DC that have a lot of really knowledgeable people about the history of communications and technology law and policy some of these are people in public interest organizations like free press there are actually a lot of organizations like mine in DC I like to think free press is the most active and most effective of them but opinions may vary we work a lot with these groups though and so a lot of my work is done through coalitions including public knowledge the new America Foundation the media access project consumers union consumer Federation of America Center for Democracy and Technology there's a group of people at the ACLU who work on communications policy and there are a bunch of others so it's really a pretty big community even though my group has a total of 35 staffers and all but seven of those work in Florence Massachusetts about three hours west of here so we have a staff of seven in our DC office but because we're able to work with this larger community of public interest people we have an impact that rivals that of AT&T just kind of shocking but it's it's really true so it's it's just it's really interesting to work with net neutrality and policy issues like this inside DC you spend a lot of time working with and talking to people who work at the Federal Communications Commission people who work as staffers of senators and representatives on the Congress committees on the hill and you get to see how the sausage is made Harold Feld is a longtime communications lawyer he used to work for the media access project and now is working for public knowledge his blog is called tales of the sausage factory because it's about policy and politics inside the Beltway and the old joke about that is laws are sort of like sausages it's two things that the result may be good but you really don't want to see how it's being made anyway I find DC to be a lot like that but I kind of like watching how it gets made but maybe I'm an oddball for that the other some of the other big players in DC just if you ever are to work in DC and especially if you're working in DC in communications you sort of need to be aware of these people you need to be aware of the tech companies you need to be aware of Google and a lot of others who are adopting an increasingly important role inside DC policy circles you need to be aware of 18D and Verizon and you need to be aware of the other companies to sprint and of T mobile and of quest and of all of the other phone companies all of these people play a significant role in shaping policy and law in DC and it's I find it interesting though it's hard for me to characterize the processes and politics of all of these groups coming together and trying to win over and win compromises with the government policymakers but I think it's fun I love working in DC and if any of you are interested in seeing how the sausage gets made you should you should look into it you should talk to me I've got lots of other suggestions as well but mostly I like working for free press I like I like working in an area of law that's not at a law firm I don't like working on appellate briefs I'm going to be working on an appellate brief because we filed as an intervener in the appeal of the Comcast case which I talk a little bit more about later but I don't like sitting in front of West Law for 12 hours a day for a week my job is not that I would be miserable I like the fact that I can honestly say I go into work on Monday morning and I don't know what 75% of my work that week is going to be because it's that dynamic it's that in response to the shifting of the political winds and I think this is characteristic of a lot of people who do policy work in DC it's it's fun it's a very different environment I just want you all to sort of think about that and consider it so anyway let's move into substance let me do let me do a cheesy poll the room how many of you consider yourselves reasonably familiar with the concept of net neutrality pretty good that that makes sense and the Comcast proceeding same question okay not quite as many but the fun thing about net neutrality or the funny thing depending on your point of view is that it's still a bit of a mess because there are still a lot of different interpretations of what that terms mean now that's been getting better three years ago you could say nobody knows what net neutrality means and you'd have a point we're starting to come to consensus but it's still there's still a lot of disagreement particularly with the different size of the political spectrum of what net neutrality means from the public interest pro net neutrality point of view net neutrality is about non discrimination and openness in networks if you talk to some of the industry friendly nonprofit groups such as the ITIF or if you talk to the industry themselves they will often claim that net neutrality is about not letting network operators do anything to their networks so net neutrality has been fought as a policy position widely over the years under the grounds that if we have net neutrality network providers won't be able to block spam they won't be able to block viruses they won't be able to stop denial of service attacks and that's just a blatant mischaracterization of the policy of net neutrality there are two other things that net neutrality is not even though a lot of people think they are Larry Lessig great guy historic figure in the communications and technology policy movement and on free press's board of directors but Larry Lessig will sometimes say that net neutrality is a most favored nation policy and that you are allowed to provide priority prioritized access and quality of service to certain types of traffic as long as you provide it to all other traffic of that type I got a little wonky but I think most of you probably still with me I don't see too many glazed over eyes yet so the idea there is that it's okay under the policy of net neutrality to prioritize say voice over internet protocol packets as long as you treat all voice over internet protocol packets the same free press and most others in the DC progressive public interest community will say that that is not what net neutrality means because the need to prioritize voice over IP packets over the internet the need to prioritize anything over the internet is not actually as great as the carriers make it out to be and further more anytime you prioritize one thing you're slowing down everything else so anytime you hear somebody pointing to a less a blog post about net neutrality just take a look at it less it is often right but once in a while we'll try out this most favored nation thing that's not what net neutrality means one more sort of red herring net neutrality net neutrality is not open access now this is a very confusing idea here and I'm taking you into some fairly advanced debates on the concept of net neutrality net neutrality is openness not open access open access to networks means that you allow other companies to use your network for retail purposes it's sort of like providing wholesale access to networks and so open access was one of the concepts in the debate over the stimulus legislation it's one of the concepts from the 700 megahertz wireless auction and it's a concept that pops up in a lot of different places it's a concept that arises from the phone networks which when they were regulated long long ago the phone network operators had to provide wholesale access to their services at regulated rates to allow other phone companies to come in and use the same set of copper wires to provide phone service and this is a system which is still in place for traditional copper networks increasingly being removed and deregulated as the telecom policy and law climate changes but open access is about getting to the wires net neutrality is about letting net neutrality is about respecting the end-to-end principle the end-to-end principle is an old concept from computer science I don't remember who coined it do you remember who coined the end-to-end principle any compside geeks in here it's been around for a long time anyway the end-to-end principle I think it was before David Reed anyway the end-to-end principle is a concept from computer science invented about the internet and the idea is that the role of the network operator in the internet is just to route the traffic it's about putting all of the intelligence and all of the management and all of the smart features of the network at the end and not trying to do something smart in the middle that prioritizes some traffic and slows down others and picks fancy routes the internet is just about routing traffic and that's the spirit of net neutrality it doesn't look at who's controlling the wires as much as what you do in them and there are a lot of engineering arguments that I could make and that a lot of others can and have made in the past about why this is still a good model for the internet but I'm not gonna consider this to be a debate against an imaginary opponent and engage in these but I offer that as a way of explaining what net neutrality really is to contrast it with these others so this is an attitude which has been the model for the internet for a long time and now the question is in the future what's the internet going to look like the providers are fighting this tooth and nail right now and usually they allege that this is because of the coming exa-flood it's because of congestion in the networks and the reason that they need to break the existing end-to-end dumb network model the internet is because there's a lot of congestion out there and it's overwhelming the networks and they're all these people using bit tour and doing peer-to-peer file sharing and networks are just getting overloaded and then everybody's watching YouTube now and now when every computer is running YouTube all the time the networks just can get overwhelmed if you just search on the concept of exa-flood you'll find a million articles talking about this and you'll also find a million responses saying that this is technological nonsense and that the backbone of the internet can handle it it's always growing it's always gonna grow there there's no truth to the rumor that in the year 2010 unless we do something the internet is going to collapse from overuse but again this is a I don't want to stage a debate with it an imaginary opponent we're actually putting together a white paper now which it's still in the early stages so I don't want to talk too much about it but but the idea behind it is to point to the fact that carriers are not trying to violate the end-to-end principle because of congestion they're trying to do it because of monetization they want to put a different price on each of your different uses of the internet and that's what we want to stop they want to charge you an incremental fee to speed up your phone calls because otherwise they might get slowed down a little bit by the internet and the same thing for your video and even more they want to charge Google to speed up searches a little bit right they wouldn't put it in exactly those terms but this is sort of a high level view of the reason why this net neutrality bait debate now which is the carriers want to monetize the internet at a very fine-grained level and we're trying to stop that we're trying to keep the content on the internet free for the price of an internet connection and we have lots of lots of evidence that we're gathering about this it's really funny when you start looking at the electronics manufacturers who sell the deep packet inspection technology then enables this kind of monetization because that's what you have to do if you're going to find out what I'm doing with my internet connection you have to look beyond the headers in the packet and you have to look at the content and you have to run that through a machine that says with this this and this pieces of content in it this is a voice-over internet protocol packet this is a web browsing packet this is an email packet some of those you can get from the ports but that can be disguised so the only way to reliably monetize the internet is to go into the packet and use deep packet inspection and when you start looking at these companies it's really pretty funny that the the information that they reveal about how the the reason for the net neutrality debate is that carriers want to monetize the internet so anyway I probably don't need to convince many people in this room of any that that's not a good thing for us it's not a good thing for the future of the internet so anyway that's all by way of background to diving into the Comcast proceeding which a number of you are familiar with but maybe you're not familiar of all of the background that goes into it so the the net neutrality concept I believe was coined in 2003 by a Tim Wu paper and there have been a lot of other really strong academics talking about this subject sense Larry Lessig as I mentioned has a lot of good papers about it Tim Wu has a lot of other good papers about it Yochai Benkler has a lot of really great papers about it over the course of the last five or six years he's been publishing on net neutrality for a long time Barbara Vanshevich over in Stanford is another one of the heavyweights but there are a lot more those are just the biggest people involved with this they've been developing the the lore and the lingo of net neutrality for many years and these these academic debates do really factor into the policy positions that they get filtered and abstracted out a lot as they go so stepping away from academia and looking at the government the net neutrality debate I would say in the government started in 2005 2005 was when the FCC decided to deregulate the phone wires as they were being used for internet access so this is DSL lines the FCC stepped in and said DSL lines you're now subject to title one of the Communications Act and not title two and I won't get into the arcana of what that freed them from but suffice it to say the DSL companies were very happy to be freed of the obligations of title to the act and subject to the loose and ephemeral regulations associated with title one on the heels of that order though the FCC attached its three page long internet policy statement which is a very short piece of law to have caused the trouble that it caused and in the internet policy statement the FCC passed four principles one is that consumers are entitled to access the lawful internet content of their choice pretty straightforward right everybody should be able to get to content the provider should not be doing anything to keep you from getting to legal content on the internet number two consumers are entitled to run applications in use services of their choice subject to the needs of law enforcement same sort of thing it's just for applications and services and not for content the third is consumers are entitled to connect their choice of legal devices that do not harm the network again it's very these are all part of the same sort of thing right the internet is the internet it's not about a proprietary network package of services and features that the carrier offers you it's the internet and you get to use it and it's open it's not discriminatory and it's free actually I shouldn't say not discriminatory because that's there's no statement in those principles that says carriers aren't allowed to discriminate against certain types of traffic and that's what leads to another round of Brua following the Comcast which we're still in the throws up the fourth principle is consumers are entitled to competition among network providers application service providers and content providers which is it's not as important as the first three in the sense of fulfilling the spirit of network neutrality is being the end to end principle and open access to the internet and by the way since I didn't say this before please feel free to raise your hands and interrupt me at any time I want this to be fairly informal so I'm happy to take questions as I'm going you're not going to throw me off my loop too seriously so the IPS comes out in 2005 on the heels of this deregulatory order for the DSL lines which was one of three orders by the way Comcast or the FCC originally deregulated cable modem lines in I want to say 2001 a long time ago this was the order that led to the brand X case which was actually argued in the Supreme Court in 05 which is an interesting case in its own right but I don't want to get into that too much detail so the the last wrinkle of the internet policy statement is that attached to these four principles is a footnote it's a it's a pretty subtle footnote it says accordingly we are not adopting rules in this policy statement the principles we adopt are subject to reasonable network management so anyway the people who follow the Comcast pursuing are probably pretty well aware of that footnote but that's it right we've got a three-page law here with four principles I won't call it a law it's a policy statement we have a three-page policy statement with four principles in a footnote that includes the phrase subject to reasonable network management and it's caused an incredible amount of room haha so we have that around the same time I think it might have been a little later we have the Madison River case before the FCC Madison River was a telephone company that decided it wasn't going to let anybody use its DSL lines to do voiceover internet protocol communications the reason is people sign up for VoIP services and stop paying Madison River 30 bucks a month for the landline obviously this is kind of I'm getting some concerned looks around here yeah it was a big deal so Madison River a complaint was filed against them for this action and they ended up settling in a way that didn't leave much of a legal precedent to guide future cases but essentially the gist of it was you shouldn't be blocking VoIP even if it does mean that you lose 30 bucks a month so Madison River is another fundamental piece here and if you read the Comcast order you'll see Madison River mentioned it gets mentioned a lot I just wanted to explain that briefly to anyone who's not familiar with it also around the same time AT&T in Bell South decided to merge together and one of the conditions that the FCC attached to their merger was compliance with the foreign policy statement principles this is like this what I just described is the entire total of law on net neutrality before 2007 it's not a whole lot three pages a settlement of a phone company that was blocking VoIP and conditions on the Bell South merger so strong principles not a whole lot of precedents we had a little bit more on 2007 the Commission put out a notice of inquiry in I think June of 2007 so the way that I'm not sure how many people in here have had administrative law but probably loosely familiar with it but just to sort of refresh the FCC is is the model for how an administrative agency passes laws is to first issue a notice of inquiry which as we're wondering if there's a problem with with the normal operations of business here and if we should step in and pass some rules regulations that guide it here's some of the things they're thinking about doing they get comments from industry they get comments from states they get comments from public interest groups then they put out a notice of proposed rulemaking the notice of proposed rulemaking gives the industry a more defined sense of the rules that the agency is thinking about adopting and allows for another round of comments and reply comments from all parties concerned to say that's a horrible idea how dare you think about such a thing which usually gets ignored or here's a reason why there's a way to interpret that which is not getting at the goal you want to get at to provide the FCC with some more specific guidance about how to pass the rules and then following the NPR and there's an order this is sort of the ideal model it was rarely followed if ever during Chairman Martin's three years as chairman of the FCC because he he was an interesting chairman and I'll leave it at that I got at least one laugh out of that anyway that's the ideal model so in 2007 in June Chairman Martin and the FCC released a notice of inquiry into industry network industry practices I forget what the exact title was to collect information about whether providers were blocking like Madison River was whether they were discriminating what they were doing essentially because the FCC was thinking about how to pass some form of network neutrality rule whether it was needed what form it would take and so forth and so on they got a lot of comments on that notice of inquiry a lot and obviously all of the industry players participated in this but but free press helped a little bit we put up a script that allowed people on our activist list you'll see some activist sheets floating around here this is to sign up for our email list and we email you when there are action alerts things that you can do like send an email to your congressman or send a filing in a docket to support the policy positions and if you don't see when you can come talk to me about it afterwards we have 500,000 people on our activist lists there are a lot of people around the country who get emails when we want them to do things like send a quick comment to the FCC or send a note to the congressman so we did one of these we started a campaign we asked the 500,000 people on our reactivist list to send comments to the FCC and if you go search through the FCC's pocket for 0752 which is the docket associated with the notice of inquiry and with the Comcast proceeding you'll find that there are 35,000 entries in that docket which I don't know if that's a record because we did the same thing with some media issues too so we've done this before but it's big suffice it to say and actually if you look in 0754 there are 25,000 more comments about net neutrality because there was a bug in the initial script that was written so they were miss filed but anyway don't really need to go into that too much so anyway in 2007 the FCC opened up this notice of inquiry and started to really make some progress on understanding network neutrality and on what to do with it and there was also the 700 megahertz wireless auction which included some forms of open access and non-discrimination and net neutrality like conditions on to bidders on this chunk of spectrum which I just want to mention for the sake of completeness. One more piece of background before I get into a little bit more about the Comcast proceeding in 2006 the industry tried very very hard to pass a bill that said there is no network neutrality they tried very hard and this is something that you don't see a lot about because I think a lot of it happened behind closed doors and they were fought by the public interest community and by the tech community and by others and they were stopped so no bill was passed in 2006 prohibiting net neutrality from becoming the law of the land. Byron Dorgan and Ed Markey, Senator Byron Dorgan North Dakota and Representative Ed Markey of Massachusetts, I think he's, is he Boston? No, is he further west in Massachusetts? Just north. Just north of Boston. Anyway, Representative Markey is a great guy. He's, I think without, I don't know Byron Dorgan's pretty good too but the two of them together are two of the most knowledgeable members of Congress on net neutrality and on all communications issues I would say and they've been really great for the public interest. Both of them put out bills Senator Dorgan in the Senate and Representative Markey in the House in 2006 that would have made net neutrality the law of the land. Neither got out of committee as far as I know. It was still a little early to try to do that but they they started the ball rolling on the hill and the ball's still rolling. Senator Dorgan has said he's going to put out a new bill soon.  The President signed the DTV bill. You don't have to move to digital television till June now. Stimulus came out of conference so hopefully at some point soon Senator Dorgan's going to put out a new net neutrality bill which will be very exciting and you'll read about it I'm sure. Okay that's all the stuff before the Comcast proceeding. Now Comcast comes along. There was an engineer named Rob Tepolsky. I've met Rob. He's a great guy. Some of you might have met Rob because he spoke at the hearing that was here. He discovered at one point that he could not upload music to bit-torn and to his credit he was not actually uploading copyrighted music. He was uploading barbershop quartet recordings from the turn of the century. I'm not kidding and I mean the turn of the 19th century. So stuff that's actually out of copyright. God bless him. He was uploading to bit-torn and discovered that his internet service provider was blocking it. He looked into a little bit. He found out that at the technical level what Comcast was doing was introducing artificial reset packets into the stream. Reset packets are part of the way that the internet is supposed to work. The reset packet is essentially a sign that the network is too crowded and you need to wait and start your communication stream a little bit later because there's no room right now and they were doing this selectively targeting bit-torn streams and some other things when they messed up in the way that they were implementing it to keep Rob and others from clogging the net for peer to peer and for things like that. Their incentives behind this have to do with the fact that cable is a shared network and so you and 199 of your closest neighbors are using the same 50 to 100 megabits of traffic. So even though you know you're supposed to have six megabits a second or 12 megabits a second or whatever cable modem service, if everybody's using that you'll get 100 kilobytes or something like that because of the way that the network is shared and so a bunch of people using P2P programs or YouTube or something like that will slow down everybody else's email. It's a long and complicated policy debate that I won't get into what the right solution to that is. I mean obviously I think that they shouldn't be sharing their network quite so often if they're having problems with people using it at the amounts that they're paying for and causing problems but anyway that's a little bit of my cynicism sneaking out there. So anyway Comcast was doing this. Rob Tepolsky wrote a blog post about it. The Associated Press looked into it, did some of their own tests, confirmed it, then it started to become a big brouhaha free press and public knowledge and some others in the community. On November 1st of 2007 filed a joint petition for declaratory ruling and a complaint with the FCC to get the FCC to stop them. This is a really unusual procedural approach to try to get something done with the FCC. A joint petition for declaratory ruling and a formal complaint all on the basis of well on the basis of a lot of things but let's say inspired by this three page internet policy statement. I got some laughs. We're going to be arguing in the DC circuit that it's not interpreting this but rather guided by this because this has no legal value. This is a policy statement and well I'll get to that in a second. So anyway free press and public knowledge and others file these complaints. The FCC really gets serious about them, holds two hearings, one here at the Berkman Center in February of 08 I think and then one at Stanford in April of 08. A lot of people come to these hearings. Actually the Berkman Center one is really funny because there's a shady public relations firm in DC that was contracted to grab people off the street and pay them to go sit in seats at the hearing in the Ames courtroom so that members of the public who were interested couldn't fit in the room. Anyway, that was just a real disaster. So they held the hearings. A lot of people came to both of them. They were both packed houses. They collected a lot of really interesting testimony and the FCC really I think made a lot of grounds in getting the government aware of the issue of net neutrality and the positions of the relevant players and of understanding what you can and can't be allowed to do as a network operator to interfere with the user's traffic. After all of this in August of 2008 the commission adopted and released an order saying through the powers vested in us by the ancillary jurisdiction that we've used for a few other things before, we will actually they've used it in a lot of different ways. I don't want to demean that. But anyway, through ancillary jurisdiction interpreting a number of different provisions of the Communications Act, carefully not saying that they were applying these, the commission released an order requiring Comcast to stop its bit torrent specific discriminatory blocking activity and to replace all of its network management systems with something that didn't discriminate, basically. Comcast immediately said, well, okay, we were going to do that anyway. And and to their credit, they have they put in a different system which we've raised some concerns about. But at least it's not protocol discriminatory. Probably, most likely there's a little there's a little wrinkle involving their VoIP service and other VoIP services. But I don't want to get into that. It's a big improvement. And so the commission in August ordered them to do this. They also ordered them to disclose a lot of details about how their old and how their new systems work, which was kind of neat, because they actually did a pretty decent job of that. They put out more information than we were expecting them to in response to this order about their old and about their new systems. So we like that. We thought they could have given us more, but we'll always ask for more. I want to dive a little bit more into this order. And this is to for the for the logics out there, because this is one of the more interesting legal issues that I've seen in a while. I've talked a lot about this three page piece of paper, and I've mentioned that it's not law and it's not policy statements in administrative agencies are indications to the industry and to the public of ways in which the agency is going to shape its future regulatory activity. This is not these principles are not saying you're not allowed to interfere with the content. They're saying that we are going to shape all of our activity in the future around the idea that consumers need to get to content that they need to use applications and services and that providers aren't allowed to interfere with that. And the DC circuit will hear and will decide how effectively the Comcast August order realized that idea. But the idea is that the order granted a complaint, which was filed on the basis of sections of the communications act to say that Comcast should not have been doing this. And it was guided in its decision to grant the complaint in the way that it did by the principles of the internet policy statement. It was not doing that as a rule. And now this may seem a little weird because I talked earlier about how, you know, the ideal way in which an agency makes laws, NOI notice who was rulemaking in an order. Well, this is one track. This is one track of how administrative agencies make law. And the other track is directly through adjudication. So some agencies do this a lot. The FCC doesn't do it in a lot of major ways, but agencies do have the legal authority to create new regulatory law just by granting a complaint. You can file a complaint saying, I don't like what's going on here. And as a matter of the Administrative Procedure Act and other pieces of federal law, the agency is allowed to say, OK, we agree, we're making new law, you have to stop it. And that's the best way to view the Comcast receding. There's actually a Supreme Court case, which will be mentioned a lot in the DC Circuit litigation called SEC versus Chennery, which I don't even remember the full details of this. But the upshot of Chennery, which is not even very widely contested, is that administrative agencies have the discretion to choose whether they want to make policy through this NOI NPRM order process or through the adjudication process. So agencies have this flexibility. And the one of the question that I think the DC Circuit will answer is, and hopefully in my favor, is whether what the FCC did was grant a complaint or whether it's try to pretend that this three page piece of paper is a set of rules. So we'll see what happens. We don't even have a briefing schedule for that case yet. So I don't even know when that's going to happen. But anyway, Commission granted the order in August. Comcast appealed it. We appealed it on some other grounds in some other circuits that we thought would be more friendly.  So our appeals were, well, we still did have other grounds for wanting to appeal it. But we were hoping to have it be in some place like the Ninth Circuit, which tends to be friendly to our issues. But even the DC Circuit has a lot of DC Circuit specific precedents that I think are very helpful to us. So I'm optimistic, cautiously, guardedly optimistic about how this will play out. But we'll see. Like I said, we don't have a briefing schedule. I have to believe that the briefing schedule and the panel assignment will be set soon so that we'll know, you know, briefs will be due in April or something like that. We're not directly involved in this. This is Comcast appealing in order of the FCC. So the case is Comcast versus the FCC. We intervened on the side of the FCC, along with the Open Internet Coalition and a lot of other public interest groups to defend the order to say, yes, the FCC did have authority to do this under Chennery and a lot of other things. I want to talk a little bit about a couple more things. First, I want to talk about just a little bit about jurisdiction, because this issue of ancillary jurisdiction is a really interesting one. And it's one that causes some rifts, even in the public interest community. Ancillary jurisdiction hinges from a couple of provisions in the Communications Act, the gist of which is that the FCC has the jurisdiction to do those things that it needs to do in order to fulfill the policies of the rest of its specifically delegated authorities. That's a pretty broad statement, depending on how ancillary to its specifically delegated responsibilities something is, the FCC can do a lot and claim that ancillary jurisdiction gives it the way to do that. And in the Comcast order, though the main argument here for why the FCC is allowed to tell Comcast that it's not allowed to discriminate is ancillary jurisdiction, ancillary to federal policies under section 230 of the Communications Act, section 706 of the Telecom Act of 1996 and a bunch of other statutes. You can read the order, there's like a dozen of them, there are a dozen different arguments why the FCC should have authority to do this. And in the Comcast order, the FCC agreed and it said it had ancillary jurisdiction to do this. So let me explain this through the lens of two other things where two other areas where the Commission has tried to exercise ancillary jurisdiction, one of which it's pretty widely accepted that it does have ancillary jurisdiction, though I don't believe it's ever been tested in court, and the other which was actually struck down. The first is interconnected voiceover internet protocol. That's a long phrase, some of you may know what that means, but probably not as many as network neutrality in the Comcast proceeding. Interconnected voiceover internet protocol or voiceover internet protocol services that actually interconnect with the public switch telephone network. So this is essentially Vonage. You buy a VoIP phone from Vonage, you plug it into your internet connection, but you call somebody from a landline with it. This is to contrast it with something like Skype, which I think might have some features which allow you to call somebody with a landline, but most of the use of Skype is to talk to another Skype user. It's really more of an over-the-internet service than something like Vonage which is designed to replace your landline phone. So interconnected VoIP remains in regulatory limbo at the FCC. It has never been officially classified as either a Title II service like phones or as a Title I service like an internet connection. And the FCC has steadily over the years been taking the pieces of the phone regulatory system Title II and applying it to interconnected VoIP where it makes sense to make sure that it's really interconnected and playing nicely with the phone network and so forth. And like I said this hasn't been challenged in court. Nevertheless it's pretty widely accepted that the FCC should have the right and the authority to do this because if they don't interconnected VoIP is not going to play well with phone services. The flip side is the broadcast flag. How many of you are aware of the broadcast flag? We've got just a couple of the biggest orcs in the room. The broadcast flag, sorry, not these two mine, the broadcast flag was the FCC several years ago trying to pass a regulation which said all makers of and I might even mess this up because I don't remember all the details of it. They were requiring electronics manufacturers to put into their devices the capacity to recognize a flag in the stream of broadcast television that said this is copyrighted content and you're not allowed to record it on your VCR, on your DVD or something like that. The idea behind this was that this would open up a market for the broadcast release of films, Hollywood films before they would otherwise be released on DVD and VHS to try to create a new market niche, a new way for broadcasters and for the industry to make money, but it only works if consumers can't make their own DVDs and VHS by recording it because otherwise they don't make the same cuts of money that they were going to make. Fish and sympathized, they were won over by Hollywood, they passed an order saying all electronics manufacturers have to include in their systems the capacity to recognize this and the court struck them down. It said you're not allowed to exercise jurisdiction over every manufacturer of video electronics equipment, ancillary to your desire to protect the markets for broadcasting for these types of movies. But again where is the line, right? Why are they allowed to exercise jurisdiction over bondage but not over Sony for the broadcast flag? I don't know, nobody really does, different opinions very widely even within the public interest community. There are some in my community who are very smart people and very sympathetic to me for all of the policy goals. We all have the same policy goals. They don't think the FCC should be given broad ancillary jurisdiction to do it. They're worried the FCC might take a wrong turn and might be co-opted by special interests or something else and so they want to have limited authority for the FCC. I'm more inclined towards saying the FCC should have broad authority for a lot of reasons that I won't get into here. One of which being that if the FCC acts badly well Congress can shut them down or the courts can shut them down and if we're not allowing the FCC to do anything we have to wait affirmatively for Congress to do it which is a really slow process. Anyway legal theory discussion more appropriate for another context which I'm happy to get into if anybody wants to shoot the bull on it. The ancillary jurisdiction is a phrase you'll hear again if you're following the telecommunications world in the FCC and I wanted to give you a little bit of a sense of what it is. So the last sort of thing I wanted to talk about is we've got this Comcast proceeding, what's next? Obviously we have the litigation in the DC circuit which will happen at some point this year. Where are we going to go? Well we're keeping our eyes on a couple other things which are still pretty current. I referenced very briefly earlier Comcast's digital voice void treatment under their new network management practices and we're keeping tabs on that. There was a really interesting letter that the FCC sent to Comcast on Sunday January 18th, two days before an on duration. The commission doesn't release a lot of things on a Sunday afternoon but they put this letter out on a Sunday afternoon in between the stepping down by Chairman Martin and Obama being sworn in as the president. They sent this the short letter to Comcast saying hey why are you treating your phone service differently than Vonage's web services and any other web services. Comcast sent a response. We're keeping tabs on that. We're not sure where it's going to go but we are watching it. Another interesting thing that's popped up in the last few weeks that we're keeping our eyes on, Cox Communications has announced that they are in the midst of conducting, they started on February 9th actually, they're conducting a new network management system in which they are picking high priority applications and uses of the internet and low priority and they are going to be treating them differently as a result of that. So their high priority includes email, web browsing, streaming video and a couple other things and their low priority includes peer-to-peer, it includes Usenet, it includes software updates. It's somewhat plausible but there's a decent bit of hubris going on in their assumption that they are the ones to pick which of my traffic uses are high priority and which are low. So we came out in a public statement and said we don't think they should be picking winners and losers like this and we hope the FCC will try to get more information out of them and so forth and so on. We haven't made a big push on it yet. It's still early, they're still conducting the trial but we're keeping our eyes on it and we're not comfortable with an internet service provider saying what is high priority and what is the low priorities of my traffic. Just to give you a little bit more of a snippet of concreteness to this, they declared P2P to be low priority. Some of you may know, most of you probably don't, CNN's web stream of the inauguration of Barack Obama was done over a peer-to-peer protocol. Right, they have a plug-in, I forget what it's called, they used it, do you know what it's called? Anyway, there's a peer-to-peer plug-in that CNN used to stream content. So my point is that you can't just point at P2P and say it's P2P and therefore it's low priority, right? I mean that's the big one but that's the one that they want to make low priority, otherwise they don't get the same kinds of values out of differentiating the traffic that they're hoping for. So we'll see what happens with that. It's still in trial, they've only, they're only testing it in like Kansas and I forget where else Missouri or some other Midwestern state. So they're testing it, we'll see what happens, we're keeping our eyes on it. The last thing I want to sort of mention is where we go next. Let's say everything plays out our way, let's say we get, oh yeah, please, sorry, no, that's a good question. And Comcast is in, it's in, you know, they've been moving in the right direction in the last few months. I'm still nervous about the phone thing, I wish they would try not to walk a regulatory dance where they think that their voice service should be treated differently than other voice services. But that's, it's probably a more complicated and nuanced question we should get into here, especially because I understand how it's treated differently on the network. Like it is treated differently on the network than other voice services. So it's not a simple, it's not a simple issue. I mean I guess I would say, I would say the best thing that Comcast could do right now is that they've already put out a system for network management that doesn't discriminate on protocols and they should be pushing for other carriers to follow suit and to make sure that when they manage the networks they're not treating different protocols differently. Because they've proved that you can do it and that it works. And that's not even a big lead for them, it just requires them to put their feet in a political direction that they don't usually do. Is that how? Yeah. That's a good question too. I don't think bandwidth caps are ideal solutions and Comcast isn't using a bandwidth cap. They're using a throttling mechanism so that a heavy user in a congested part of the network gets throttled back to a scavenger class of using bandwidth from everybody else's damage. I don't think it's the best way to do that. I think you could find ways to give them more than just the remnants of bandwidth but this is a more complicated question. Is Comcast using a bandwidth cap? Because I didn't think they were. I thought Time Warner was and the soft one. Okay, no, that's right. They are using a soft bandwidth cap. We're after use 250 gigabits a month or something like that. They'll call you or something like that. I don't think bandwidth caps are the right solution. I don't think they're necessary but I'm not going to pick a fight over them now. We have much bigger problems than bandwidth caps. Is that? Yeah. If we fix discrimination of protocols then we'll look at bandwidth caps and whether carriers arguments about whether they need to do this or not, whether those would water and and you know I'd want to look at pricing for overage charges if there are overage charges and things like that too because that's something where they could really milk a lot of money out of people when there is an economic justification for it. But that's also like I don't I don't want to get into that now. I don't want to raise that fight with them now. That's not, it's not the top of my priority list at all. Well I saw, I saw a couple different versions of that as it was making its way through the process. The understanding I have is that Senator Feinstein was trying to put language into the stimulus bill that would protect the right of network operators to police against copyright violations and child pornography and things like that which is a really tough question because of section 230 and the safe harvest that internet service providers get for the very reason that as soon as you, as soon as you do anything that makes it look like you're requiring them to do that now suddenly they'll really be required to do that or they'll be legally on the hook for copyright violations committed by the users and the last thing the carriers want, the last thing that I want is for the carriers to be legally liable for illegal activity by their users because that's really transforming the nature of the internet. So I was nervous about that to the extent that it sort of started across that line of like there's the carriers and then there's the users and they're not supposed to be supervising the users like that and they shouldn't have to be. So the last I saw I think that came out in conference or didn't get in finally so I don't think that made it in to the final bills but I haven't read language or anything like that yet so I was I was not supporting anything like that. So let's use that as an example though to sort of get at this ancillary jurisdiction. Sure. I mean certainly the FCC has a tradition of regulating content that we see in broadcast space. Sure. And making decisions about what is or is not appropriate for people to be paying attention to. Is there a concern with sort of broadening the ancillary jurisdiction that the windows of the FCC maybe as the commission changes, new commissioners can see, new administrations find ways to apply pressure that with something that broadens ancillary jurisdiction and this sort of adjudicated process of policy making that it sort of it goes out. There is a real concern over that and there is the possibility of that. But I think the the idea is that I don't want to call it an optimist versus a pessimist thing because over the next 20 years we will definitely no question have FCC's that are very friendly to my issues and very opposed to my issues like we will get both over the course of the next 20 years so we'll have to deal with both. So the the issue is you have problems on both sides I think you have narrow ancillary jurisdiction and limited authority and responsibility for the FCC which means that when the FCC wants to do something good they have to go to Congress and get the authority to do that. But it also means that when the FCC wants to do something bad that they'll be more limited in their ability to do that. The flip side if you adopt a broad interpretation of ancillary jurisdiction and the authority of the FCC is that to do something good they can just do it and if they do something bad Congress can step in and stop them. And the reason I think at heart why I personally I won't speak for everybody even at free press but we're a reasonably pro increasing FCC authority public interest group as they go but certainly me personally the reason I prefer a broader interpretation of ancillary jurisdiction is that I think it's easier to get Congress to act to stop something than to get Congress to act to do something. And so I'm more comfortable with the world in which we need Congress to act to stop bad activities than I am with the world in which Congress to act to get good activities possible. Does that make sense? I've had this argument with Derek Slater who was a Berkman Center Fellow for many years some of you I'm sure know him and is now working for Google's policy shop and it's fun. It's always fun. Anyway the only other thing I wanted to say very briefly is that other than these monitoring things that we're doing now the next thing that we would like to see out of the network neutrality world and this is hardly a secret we've hinted about this many times before is we want to see, we want to look at wireless. We do. Wireless is an interesting situation. We have said, Interim Chairman Michael Kops has said that the internet policy statement applies to wireless networks. Wireless carriers have said, oh my god under no circumstances does the internet policy statement apply to wireless networks. He will destroy our world if you apply the internet policy statement to wireless networks. We certainly don't think that's the case and we'll see. Tim Wu has a really neat paper from a few years ago called Wireless Carterphone. If I think you should read about these issues it would be Wireless Carterphone. It is a really, really good paper. Anyway that will give you more of a sense of net neutrality in the wireless world and the meanings and the policy and arguments and so forth and so forth. Anyway. Questions? Go ahead. Yeah, if people need to go to class, go. Some people have it, clearly. What's the baseline of, I'm sorry, I didn't know the game this morning. That's fine, don't worry about it. But at the end of the day, what is the actual objection to fine-grained monetization of services and things? Because it sounds like you definitely introduced one that's like the, and I'm not as familiar with those with technology but I decided that there's a pragmatic technological implementation problem and that's the CNN computer challenge, right? But aside from that I have a sense that I was at a hotel recently getting wireless service and I realized that I had a big frustration or more of a frustration paying for a larger, more expensive 24 hours of service as opposed to a minute by minute more expensive but I was actually using the 15 minutes that I was getting. So I don't know what the, as a consumer advocate, like I'm not quite sure how to imagine what the consumer would actually want here if they could rank their own service desires and rank their own priorities with that whole issue. It's a very good question and I certainly do. The reason why is that for the uses of the internet that consumers for what consumers are using the internet for today there is no question well, maybe not no question but it's certainly possible that they could pay less money to do the same things on the internet that they're doing today if there was a world where different uses of the internet were monetized. The problem is the internet is valuable to society because of the innovations that it produces and so if you have a market where everything is monetized suddenly when a new use of the internet pops up, what do you charge for that? If you're charging people anything for it, frankly, it retards adoption of this new and innovative thing. I know this is a little bit of a if you build it, they will come kind of argument, but my arguments for why monetization, even though it could lower people's internet bills, are that we will see much less innovation on the internet because carriers will, especially if we allow them to pick and choose winners, they could structure all sorts of side deals and suddenly having the next internet innovation is not about just having a good idea it's not about having a Facebook it's about having a Facebook kind of idea and pain for prioritized treatment with AT&T and Verizon and Comcast and Time Warner and Sprint and T-Mobile and everybody else and that's obviously a problem. Yeah. I don't know what our official position is on, Muny Wi-Fi is the idea. I know there are a lot of organizations in the DC community that have looked in this and are very supportive of municipal Wi-Fi efforts. I think most of the reasons why you haven't seen municipal Wi-FIs yet is more about engineering hurdles than anything else. There's one thing that would make municipal Wi-Fi networks more feasible and this is something that the entire DC telecom community is starting to look at more and this is the question of special access. So special access is the way in which small internet service providers and presumably municipalities would actually connect the local networks that they build to the backbone of the internet. Special access rates are widely alleged to be artificially inflated. Sprint is one of the big people who's arguing that special access rates are really high and so in other words in order for Sprint to offer mobile broadband services it has to hook up T1 lines and faster connections to all of its cell towers to carry that internet from the cell tower to the backbone of the internet. And Sprint has come out on record a lot of different times and said the rates for these connections are way too high. So if something were to happen along the lines of what Sprint suggests and others as well on industry and some public interest people though, the public interest community hasn't gotten into this a lot yet. If those rates were to go down if it became more feasible to offer smaller internet service connections I think it would be cheaper for Muni Wi-Fi to be created. I don't think that would solve all of the obstacles it wouldn't hurt. I couldn't possibly guess at a timeline when we might start to see more Muni Wi-Fi's or even if because there are still other obstacles, particularly engineering obstacles. Yep. Yeah. Well, that's an interesting question. I think whether they have a neutrality problem some of them do and some of them don't. But you're right that the question was whether the FCC will ever or whether Congress might need to step up and see whether the FCC will be able to do that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, Congress might need to step in and do it, but whether there's momentum or arguments for returning broadband internet services to an open access title II style to that type of regulatory paradigm I don't think there's a lot of momentum for it and I'm not really sure why except that it's a big political push and I don't think it's necessary to solve the problems, but you're right that countries that have open access networks do have more choices for broadband providers they tend to have faster and cheaper services a result of better competition for your last one connection to the internet. The UK is a good example of this, right? They have open access to all of their copper wires. UK it has very few cable modems and mostly DSL lines part of the reason being that it's a geographically small country and anytime you run copper wires for longer than something like a mile and maybe it's even less than that the speed that they can carry for internet traffic goes down really far and so it's easier to cover a substantial part of the United Kingdom with copper wires so most people have DSL they have an open access regime in place so there was a I saw a chart once it was on a website some guy was trying to figure out who to pick to buy his internet service connection from and he had this spreadsheet of like 100 providers and like 20 services from each it was the most mind-boggling difficult decision for him in the world to try to decide who to buy internet service from and I was just like I don't really I have a very complex emotional reaction to that I would prefer a world in which we had that I don't think that I think there are a lot of arguments not to impose that as well right because Verizon I'll play I'll play cheerleader for Verizon for maybe the first time in a long time Verizon put a ton of money into putting fiber optic networks over a large part of the country they wouldn't have done that if they had to sell that to a bunch of other people because they wouldn't have been sure that they could make the investment on that and I don't think we should step in and say Verizon has to sell access at a wholesale level to the providers for this I mean if under the right circumstances constructed in the right way it's very possible that that kind of change could have a good thing for the American internet system but it's dangerous and I personally would not push for that because I'd be worried that it'd be messed up and then it could really change the amount of money that the carriers do invest in I'm from Europe and in the European Union we've had since 2002 a directive which is an access directive and which includes the provision which explicitly says that in case the end-to-end connectivity principle is just I talked about that principle is increased regulatory authorities equivalent of FCC they trigger whatever regulatory remedies they they feel need so it's been a binding load in 27 understates since 2004 or the last 5 years now it's been triggered once actually in my state in Poland quite similarly as it happened here the case was handled very easily despite the real war between the regulatory authority and the incumbent telecom provider over access to the access network so is this really what's here? I'd push back on two of your assertions the first is that the Comcast matter was handled easily there were hearings, arguments senate hearings it was a big fight and I think even people at free press who were leading the charge the entire way were not necessarily expecting it to come out in their favor the legal framework there was not as strong as in the EU and so we had more of an uphill battle and I think we were happy and surprised that we were able to win the fight as convincingly as we did the other thing that I want to push back on is that directive while beautifully worded leaves discretion to each of the different regulatory authorities of the country to enforce or not enforce the antenna principle as they see fit and so one of the reasons perhaps why there has only been one triggering of it is that the political environments in these countries are such that they face a lot of pressure not to enforce that I could be wrong I would be crazy about that so the last thing for them to really consider is not to step in that's true another piece here is that the network new charter debate has only been alive for the last few years despite the fact that the internet has been around for a long time because only now is the deep packet of inspection technology advanced enough that it can be conceivably used to allow the providers to monetize the internet so we're only now at a state where providers could really profit a lot from violating the antenna principle so that's another reason why I think proactive rules to try to prevent that kind of behavior would be good does that help I mean it's a little speculative it's a little speculative but it's better to set guidance for the market as it develops rather than try to step in later once the problems have been created and change the market completely we don't want to consider this to be a war against the carriers we want to provide guidelines that the carriers can use to develop their networks and their network management systems in a way that doesn't interfere with the antenna principle so that they're not wasting investment on things like Comcast put a lot of money into its reset packet Sandvine networking equipment and they had to go through and change the protocol I don't know anything about the costs I think they were able to use a lot of the same electronics in the new system they just had to put different software on them but I don't know the details of that but we don't want them to invest in a new way of managing their networks that's going to interfere with the antenna principle because either they're going to interfere with the antenna principle or they're going to have to change the systems and neither of those is a good solution there are rules that say here's what to do to invest in a network that's good for you and good for the consumer maybe that helps you wanted to criticize my cheerleading for horizon it's a strange aesthetic so if you're a horizon phone customer you can fit any long-distance company when horizon comes into your house and installs this fancy pyrotic line part of the deal is that they rip out the offer line and no one else can offer long-distance service over their fiber other than horizon so yeah they're great for spending billions of dollars but they've just destroyed any competition on there that is a real problem the ripping out of copper lines while installing the locked up fiber bothers me I don't think about it as often as perhaps I should but that does bother me yeah I don't know if that's equal yeah maybe her first since I yeah that's a really interesting question I can't really speculate over we have 500,000 people on our activist lists they cross the board I think a lot of them are civil liberties types I think a lot of them are tech types and I think a lot of them in our community in particular are open media types especially because that's how we started and that's how we frame a lot of our issues about transforming the media and so a lot of it's people who are really ticked about the syndicated news shows running on CNN and MSNBC and Fox News all the time and want to see some change in that and it's an interesting it's an interesting thing FreePress build itself from the ground up as being an inside-outside organization so we have our inside team in DC that takes these issues and takes them to the FCC into the hill and writes policy papers and writes white papers and writes filings and then we have the outside team which are the people in Florence who coordinate and structure and build campaigns to collect and to direct towards the inside team the opinions and the will of our 500,000 members because we want to be serving our 500,000 members and our tagline is that we want to give them a voice inside the bell way so it is interesting and it's tricky and not every policy position that we advocate for can be effectively cast into terms that will catch on with our activist base the big ones do the white spaces debate was our last speech push the white spaces debate and I think this is actually like I wasn't involved in the messaging of this I actually have only been at FreePress since last August I was at the FCC before that so I wasn't heavily involved in the white spaces debate at all but the work of FreePress people to explain to the public the benefits of having unlicensed wireless devices and the neat things that they could do with these without having to have like a wireless device being a cell phone with a two-year contract like it's just a device and it's free and it can connect to other devices and you can do incredibly neat things with this that we can't even imagine it's tricky to explain these policy debates through those terms but it's really important and so we have a lot of people who make that their job does that help? No, it's to me, Verizon Copper Restriction and also just Joe how do you feel about the I guess last mile policy in case residents own the last mile or five routes to the house that connects is the neighbor known or in charge of my own what do you want to call it? This is the paper that Derek Slater and Tim Wu put out about owning the last mile? Yeah, well so I mean most of the time you don't own the last mile but there are pushes from Derek Slater and Tim Wu wrote the most recent paper on this they presented this a couple months ago about owning the last mile would this be something that comes with your house? It's an interesting idea, I think it is something that could be feasible the tricky part is establishing the open point of presence that that last mile connects to and getting providers into there it's a neat idea I think it's still in its early stages I think we'll look at it more but I don't think it's something that would work for every market in the country it'll work well for especially like new condo developments where you could lay the wire in and you could really sell the fiber cable with the condo or with the house it's neat I don't know if it would work everywhere it's currently constructed, the ideas that I've seen but it's neat Sure Well thank you We try to give people as much as they can to be helpful I mean there's always follow the news is I think the next best thing because we don't give you as much news there's a free press RSS feed of news headlines which updates 10 or 15 articles a day and it's one of the best sources for following news articles that do matter to the public the people who run that in our Florence office are really good about it so and I can give you more information about that later Yeah, get in touch with your local congressmen is the best thing you can do because we are getting to be effective participants in the policy debate in DC we've had some successes, we've also had some failures I think one of the biggest turtles for us in trying to compete with the lobbying and leverage that AT&T's and Verizon's of the world have is in getting more relationships with senators and congressmen we still don't have the same kind of access and so the more people we have who are on our lists and who are establishing relationships with members of congress the more members of congress who are aware of free press and what we try to do the better positioned we are to make progressive policy change with move on we don't tie into their base of supporters we're not that closely affiliated with them we've worked with them in the past there's a poster in the hallway when you go into my office I think the title of the poster is what do free press, moveon.org and the Christian Coalition of America all have in common and it's about network neutrality it's just this like my boss Ben Scott, our policy director is a wizard at forming coalitions like this and so we got the move on people in the Christian Coalition of America on our side on our side of network neutrality so I know we worked with them a little bit in some of the messaging stages of that but not a lot moveon is probably also a little bit more partisan we try to be, we do try to be nonpartisan I think that might be it well that's a great question were there any final questions for slowly leaking people as classes start and people want to figure out the importance but thanks for coming thanks for coming


My name is Andrew Bossi and I am the Executive Director of Maine Citizens for Clean Elections. Thank you so much for being here today. We are here to celebrate an important and remarkable citizen-led effort that will shine a light on dark money on our elections, make our politicians more accountable to us, and restore our Maine Clean Election Law. This is an effort of, by, and for Maine people. We're here today because we want a government that's accountable to voters not bought and paid for by wealthy special interests. We're here today because when our democracy is threatened by big money, we, the people, will stand up and fight back. So I'm going to introduce a few key people in this effort who made this milestone possible in addition to all of the people behind and ahead of us that made this possible to make a few brief remarks. After that, we'll take some questions from the press and our citizen signers and field staff will lead this effort where we'll deliver the signatures to the secretaries straight in the cross-office building. That's on the fourth floor of the Burton Cross-Office Building. Several of us will also be available for questions after the press conference. So first up, I'd like to introduce MCCE's program director, BJ McCollister. BJ engineered our signature gathering effort and is here today to report on what is right before you. BJ. Thank you, Andy, and congratulations to the thousands of Mainers who made today possible. Today marks an important milestone in our Clean Elections Initiative, all made possible by over 1,000 public-spirited Maine citizens that went to the polls and went to fairs to collect signatures this summer. As Andy mentioned, this effort is truly of, by, and for Maine people. From Kinnery to Allagash and from Bethel to Lubeck, Maine voters stepped up to collect signatures in all 16 counties across the state. And today, we are presenting 85,185 signatures to qualify a measure for the ballot that will ensure that everyone, not just the wealthy, are represented in our democracy. During this campaign, over 1,000 volunteers collected over 85,000 signatures from Mainers that won a government of, by, and for the people. And those 85,000 people will talk to friends, neighbors, and family, and those will talk to more. This movement is growing, this movement is gaining steam, and it won't stop until it's unequivocally clear that we want a government that's accountable to voters, not wealthy donors. I am proud to announce that this November, Maine voters will get the chance to renew their support for transparency, accountability, and a robust Clean Elections system. And it's because of the people around me and the thousands of Mainers who signed the petition to make sure that we have a government that's working for us. Now many of the people behind me started with us nine months ago, and many joined along the way. And from Aroussic to York and every county of this state, in 264 towns, the people behind me spoke with friends, neighbors, and recruited volunteers for Primary Day, for fairs and festivals throughout the summer, and they capped off their drive with an amazing push on Election Day. In short, we delivered for Maine people. I am proud to stand with these people today, and I thank them for devoting so much time, energy, and passion to our cause. We have a long way to go, but today is about celebrating how far we've come, and these 85,185 signatures, this is about coming together for a government of, by, and for the people. Thank you, everybody, for all you've done. Thank you so much, BJ. Next up is Anne Luther, the lead citizen signer of this initiative, and is a respected leader in both the League of Women Voters and Maine Citizens for Clean Elections, long recognized as a trusted analyst and advocate on elections and campaign finance policy, and stepped up to a new, in a new way to co-lead our local signature gathering efforts in Hancock and Washington County. Anne. Hey, good morning, good morning, fellow Mainers. It's fitting to mark the anniversary of the disastrous Citizens United ruling with a concrete demonstration of Maine's motto, dear ago, or I lead. The future is in our hands, and so are 85,185 signatures that will qualify clean elections for the ballot. Uh-huh. Nine months ago, nine months ago, this moment was just a twinkle in our eyes, but we did it. Town clerks in every county in Maine have validated the signatures that you and I and so many others have collected. Congratulations to us all. I am so proud of what we've done and even more proud of what it means. Maine people are stepping up, just as they did 20 years ago, to address the problems of money in politics, undiscouraged by bad Supreme Court decisions, legislative inaction, gubernatorial vetoes, and repeated raids on the clean election fund. You and I are fulfilling our responsibility as citizens to strengthen our clean elections laws in an era of big money. Here, here. Yeah. Together, together, we are bringing needed transparency to election and post-election spending. We're raising the stakes so that would-be violators will think twice before breaking our campaign finance laws, and we're restoring the viability of our first in the nation clean election program. People around the country are watching. Maine people are stepping up. Where Washington and Augusta have failed, we will not fail. We can do this. We're going to do it. Today is about Maine people leading on one of the most important issues of our time. We simply will not back down when it comes to strengthening our democracy and the role of everyday people in it. We have much more to do, but today is about coming together to celebrate an important milestone. Thank you all for being here and for all you did to make today possible. Thank you so much. Now, I'd like to introduce recently retired Senator Ed Youngblood of Brewer. Before he entered politics, Ed was a banker, retiring as senior vice president after 30 years with Bangor Savings Bank. 15 years ago in 2000, Ed was a pioneer who used clean elections in his first run for office when the system was brand new and untested. He has been a powerful advocate for their program ever since. Here's Ed. Thank you, Anne. What a wonderful day to all come together. Democracy works best when good people get involved. Look around the room and see all the good people that are here today. There are no special qualifications needed to do this. We all have something to offer, and it all will make our communities and our state a better place for all of us to live. The Clean Election Initiative is all about making sure that main people have the opportunity to step up, run for office, serve their constituents without relying on big money special interests. High price lobbyists and there are a lot of them around and wealthy special interests must take a back seat to main people. That's why I'm here and why I spent Election Day talking with folks in my town about why the Clean Election Initiative is so important. So much about politics is about divisions. But in the Clean Election endeavor, we are mainers first all together. Republicans, Republicans like me, did work alongside Democrats, Greens, unenrolled voters to collect these signatures. That's a reflection of the widespread concern about the skyrocketing cost of elections and the growing role of money in politics. I consider myself a fiscal conservative. But regardless of how we label ourselves, I know that none of us favor sweetheart deals and giveaways promoted by big campaign donors over the interests of ordinary main people. Elections and government must be of, by and for, main people. We can do so much better and the Clean Election Initiative is exactly what we need. I want everyone who represents us in Augusta to have the same chance that I had. A chance to run a robust campaign, send it on voters in my district, win an election without being beholden to any campaign contributor, and serve in the statehouse knowing that I would never have to ask one of the many lobbyists that walked these hallways for a donation to my reelection campaign. Transparency, accountability, strong election laws is how we empower main voters to ensure government will be of, by and for, the people of Maine. I want to thank you all for your role in restoring, working toward restoring our main clean elections program. Together, we'll deliver these petitions so that Maine can deliver on the promise of clean elections. Thank you very much. Terrific. Thank you, Ann and Ed. There are hundreds of Maine people that deserve to be at this podium right now. All of you have so many stories, important stories to tell about money and politics. But we have a delivery to make today. And so I'm going to introduce just one more speaker that was a volunteer for this effort to talk, to make a few words about the Clean Elections Initiative. Jolene Lovejoy is a community leader from Rumford. She is one of the pioneers, like Senator Youngblood, who used an unproven new campaign finance system in 2000. Improved, it works. While Jolene did not win the seat in the House of Representatives, she did become a passionate voice for clean elections and all the opportunities it provides. Jolene? Thank you very much, Andy. And welcome to all of you here today. Good morning. I am Jolene Lovejoy. And as Andy said, I'm a very proud resident of the town of Rumford. In the year 2000, I had the greatest honor of running for the main House of Representatives as both a Republican and as a clean election candidate. So it's no wonder that on election day in 2014, I stood at the polls once again, this time to collect signatures for the Clean Elections Initiative. I support clean elections because I believe a candidate should never feel beholding to anyone other than the citizens that they run to represent. I was most proud to be a pioneer for clean elections. I wanted clean elections to work because I wanted to come to Augusta and represent only the people that had voted for me in my district. It shouldn't be whether one's rich or poor. Anyone with ideas and drives should be able to run for office. In Maine, we believe in hard work and fairness for all. When people from all walks of life, not just the wealthy, can serve in public office here in Augusta. Through my experience, both in business and community service, I've learned that all of us have something unique to contribute. No one should ever feel left out of the process. We should always welcome and encourage people from all walks of life to participate in the political arena. Clean elections opens that door of opportunity so that the widest possible range of people can bring their voices and perspective here to the state house in Augusta. Back in 2000, when I knocked on doors of constituents, folks didn't know very much about clean elections, and I made it part of my run to inform them about what was going on. As I began to explain and they asked questions, I could see pride rising up in their eyes. Pride in the knowledge that their state, the place they call home, was at the forefront of the fight for a more fair and accountable democracy. Unfortunately, that fight is not over. As clean elections has been eroded and the need for reform has become more and more clear, Mainers once stood at the polls with petitions in hand. Look at us, every day citizens throughout the state of Maine, each who worked to get the signatures. Our message is loud and it is clear. We are tired of big, dark money calling the shots. We're tired of special interest trying to influence our elected officials. A democracy cannot be bought. Enough is enough. We the people of Maine are the voice of the state. We want our government to work for us. Whether we're Democrats, Republicans, or even independents, we are all Mainers first and foremost. And because of that, we want a government that better represents all of us. A government of, by, and for the people of Maine and we deserve no less. Thank you so much, Jolene, and thank you to all the pioneers who pitched in to make the signature gathering effort possible. We stand shoulder to shoulder today. And it's a good thing that those shoulders are strong because there is a new generation coming up that has a big stake in creating a strong foundation for our future. Our 1,000 volunteers include everyone from students to retirees. And that's a good thing. Young and old, urban and rural, North, South, liberal and conservative, we are Mainers first. All right. So the Clean Elections Initiative is really of, by, and for the people. I want you folks to raise your hand if you pitched in for this effort. Yes, that's right. How many of you collected signatures? How many of you stood up polls? Yeah. How many of you hosted an event? We got to fix that. Looks like just about everyone here has made this initiative possible. Now, I want to say congratulations to Mainers on this first and important step in making our democracy even stronger. And tell us a little bit about the signature process here. How many people were involved and what happened? There were over 1,000 volunteers involved working over nine months to collect 85,185 signatures to put a Clean Elections Initiative on the ballot. It was a remarkable effort. Lots of volunteers pitched in. It was a large number of signatures. We exceeded our goal. We're so proud. And where were they gathering the signatures? Most of them were gathered on election day in 2014, some on primary day in 2014, and some at fairs, festivals, days of action over the summer. But by far the majority were on election day. And what kind of people were involved in the signature gathering process? It was everybody, from soup to nuts, almost all volunteers, like 99.9% volunteers, people from all walks of life, from all political stripes, Republicans, Democrats, independents, unenrolled, greens, everybody, from all walks of life, all jobs, all economic strata. It was just a real cross-section of main people. Now that you have the signatures there and it will be on the ballot in November, what are your next steps? Well, it has to go through a legislative process first, submitting it now. It will be before the first session of this legislature. And then depending on their action, we expect to be on the ballot in 2015. And what kind of education outreach campaign do you expect to have over the course of the summer and fall to get people to vote for it? Well, main people are by and large in favor of publicly financed elections. The clean election program is already well known and well understood. It's been supported by main people for over 15 years. So people already know that they like the clean election program and want it to work. People also know that they want big money out of politics. So we're starting out with main people behind us. And we just want to keep telling that story. This is a way to have a government of by and for the people and people are with us. And from a technical perspective, there were objections and legal problems with the previous clean election campaign. How is this initiative different? And how does it get around those objections? Well, the Supreme Court originally upheld our matching funds provision when it first went into effect. But it was overturned by the Supreme Court more recently. This program allows candidates running in competitive districts to access supplemental funding by demonstrating additional support in their district. So the more $5 qualifying contributions they can collect, the more supplemental funding they can access up to a maximum, which would be comparable to what they had access to under the old scheme. But because it's not a triggered matching fund triggered by someone else's spending, but only by the candidate's own action and support in their district, it's totally constitutional. And in some districts, you may have a clean election campaign candidate. But you may have somebody who has going with the big money. How do you handle that balance or that tension? Well, the program now allows candidates to get a very generous amount of supplemental funding, but it is capped. It's sufficient, but it will never be enough to beat a candidate who accesses a ton of money. But it is enough. It's enough for them to get their message out to run a robust independent campaign, even in a competitive district against a privately financed opponent. And we know that because we know before when we had triggered matching funds and privately financed candidates opposing each other, the clean election candidates were highly competitive in those races. So we think we've provided for enough funding for those candidates to run competitive campaigns. And what does all this mean for the future of Maine and its elections and its electorates? Well, I mean, dear ago, I lead. We think that this public financing program, the Clean Elections Act, was a groundbreaking program. In Maine, it was groundbreaking nationwide. We believe publicly financed campaigns are one of the remaining constitutional paths forward to get big money out of politics. And Maine has had a long tradition of fighting against big money in politics, and we think this is going to strengthen that tradition and provide hope and inspiration for people around the country to do the same in their state and at the federal level.


Our program serves to make sure that students feel like they're cared for and that they're being advocated for both here and off campus. So I get to work with students individually and while they're in groups. Academic counseling, we support students in their individual academic plans. So supporting students in figuring out what a good balance of course is to take, supporting students in figuring out what major to select. And academic counseling also includes a range of other aspects. So supporting students in understanding what does financial aid look like. We also support students in figuring out their balance when maybe they need child care or they're thinking about life after Cal. So what do I do? Do I go to graduate school? Do I work? So supporting students in those pieces. Graduation gown lending is a project that is used for graduating seniors so that they are able to receive their cap and gown for free as a rental. And the last one that we do offer is the graduate school resources and that is for the low income EOP students where they do receive discounts on certain grad school exams. So USP works to support students on campus, specifically the undocumented community. We work to empower students so we provide the various resources and all that to provide a safe space and for students to feel like they have a place where they belong. We work with students holistically and are able to provide support services and networks and resources based off of the individual student and what they need and what they're looking for in their growth. And so I'm really happy that we're able to provide that kind of service and to see the impact that these students, our students, our EOP students are able to have in their communities currently and to see the reverberating impact that they have as they go beyond Berkeley.