I will later do the introduction in English, but first in German.

I will now introduce the speakers. Democratic Party with Barack Obama. I am one of the host of the I am also the host of the

World Bank. One of the main topics is Marvin Amur. He is a free press organization and also the Internet.com. The Internet.com is the best company for net neutrality. I am here today to talk to

600,000 people. There are over 1 million people who are motivated in Europe to contact you. There is also the American internet community. I am here today to talk about net neutrality. I am here today to talk about

the provider Comcast. Comcast is the company that I am working on. I am also the host of the peer-to-peer discussion. I am here today to talk about

Marvin was in this very great podcast with the internet. I am here today to talk about the energy of the

Yeah, I don't know where to put it.

And now a first short introduction in English. Welcome Marvin Amur from formally from Free Press and now a professor on law

from the United States about net neutrality movement in the United States and learn from it and do it better in Europe, thanks. Thank you everyone, thank you for being here. So I'm gonna talk about the American experience

with network neutrality and in general the sort of media reform open internet movement and the movement for internet for all in the US. And so that's, let's see, I don't know how to.

So I was a lawyer for a group called Free Press. Free Press is one of the leading advocacy groups in Washington DC working on open internet issues and fighting for a more democratic media.

So the chairman of Free Press is a guy named Tim Wu. He invented the term net neutrality. He's a law professor in New York. One of our board members is a guy named Larry Lessig. He created Creative Commons and Free Culture

and he works on changing Congress in the US. Just sort of give you a background. This is Ben Scott, he's our brilliant policy director in DC. And in general, we've been able to assemble good friends within that organization and outside the organization

based mainly on people wanting to work with other people who are doing interesting stuff. And since we're in Germany, I just have to mention one of our close friends is one of my heroes is this German woman who's a professor at Stanford

who's been one of my key advisors for years, Barbara Vineshavik, who's a net neutrality expert. To me, I don't know if you get this reference, she's like Lafayette who's the great French nobleman who volunteered in the American Revolution. So that's Barbara Vineshavik is our, the Lafayette of net neutrality.

So Free Press was born out of this concern. The concern that if too few people control what we see, what we read, where we get our news from, if too few people control how we can communicate

with one another, that affects our democracy. That affects our ability to communicate with one another and to govern. That there's a threat from media consolidation, from control from a few people. And here's a graphic of in the US,

just a few companies, this is a few years ago, just a few companies controlled a lot of what people saw and where they got their news. And then we have the new media, the internet, and there was a fear that the model of a few people controlling the media, the old model,

could have been ported onto the new media. And so Free Press as an organization works in both the old media space and the new media space in the US. And so this is, I don't know if you've seen this picture before, this is a graphic representation of the internet,

a place where you can communicate with each other without having to get permission from a broadcaster, a cable company, a phone company generally. So that's Free Press. Save the Internet was a group, a coalition of organizations

that Free Press organized around net neutrality. And we'll get back to that. The idea behind Free Press and a lot of what we've been doing is essentially to start what people refer to as a movement. And in the US people will talk about a movement, like people coming together around the same cause.

Lots of different organizations, lots of different people. And one of the classic movements is in the US, the civil rights movement. Like there's Martin Luther King, and there was a whole movement, a political movement, a legal movement, an organizational movement to organize people around a cause and around an issue to change the law

and to change society. And so the goal of, say, Free Press was not to just be a legal organization with lawyers like me suing people. It wasn't just to be a campaign of media organizers. It was supposed to be an integrated movement of lawyers, advocates, and people organizing the public

around these causes to inform them about why it mattered. And for many years people didn't realize the importance of media issues because the media didn't cover it very well. It took the Internet to really be able to organize people around that issue. So another movement, the environmental movement.

And the strategy, as I mentioned, was sort of an inside-outside strategy. These are all American references, so I'll explain. Thurgood Marshall was the great lawyer of the civil rights movement. And so he was sort of the inside, but the outside was the organizers, people organizing to boycott different

segregationist establishments in the South. I don't know if all of you know, but in the US we used to have something like apartheid in the South, and there was this movement that overtook that. So in order to explain to the public

why they should care about media and Internet issues, the issues that a lot of us care about, we often talk about if you care about the war, if you care about war, you should care about media, because media affects whether or not we go to war, what information people get about war. If you care about, in the US, healthcare,

and I hear you guys have a good healthcare system, but if you care about that, you should care about the media and how it's covered. If you care about environments, or poverty, or huge bank bailouts in the US, you should care about the media. That's how we try to,

sort of the second issue for people is our argument. So let me explain where Free Press began. Free Press began sort of traditionally with a media ownership fight, and the lessons we learned in this fight could be helpful, as Marcus said, in Europe,

and it was certainly helpful for the next fights we had on network neutrality. So media ownership begins with these two guys. So George Bush was president for a little while, for eight years, and the other guy was Michael Powell, his first chairman of the FCC.

The FCC regulates technologies in the US, broadcast, cable, internet. So Michael Powell and George Bush were very similar. They loved deregulation, not regulating big companies. They had two famous fathers, right? So George Bush's famous father is that guy,

and then Michael Powell's famous father is Colin Powell. So here was the big fight in 2003. There were rules that restrict in the US whether or not a TV company can own a newspaper in the same city,

and the Bush administration wanted to change that. They wanted to let somebody own both of them in the same city, and Free Press and a lot of other people, a lot of organizations didn't like that rule, that rule change. They thought it would be bad for democracy if one person owned both the TV station and the newspaper, and so Free Press as an organization

was born out of this fight, the idea that local news should be controlled by more than one person. So we couldn't convince Michael Powell that he was doing a bad idea, so he adopted an order at the FCC. We went to court, and we ended up winning

and stopping Michael Powell, and these are the two lawyers who went to court, and these two lawyers had spent years and years doing media reform, losing over and over and over, and they finally won once, and so kind of like Sisyphus for years of losing,

he just kept losing, and one of the reasons why these two people finally won is because they were able to be part of a movement. There was an organization. They was able to put pressure on Congress,

and the court noticed that there was lots of public dissatisfaction with this rule, so there were conferences across the country of thousands of people to talk about media reform. They organized the National Rifle Association, which is a very conservative group in the US in favor of gun rights, and lots of liberal groups,

so here's one, United Church of Christ. This is Obama's church. It's a liberal church, and other churches were also involved. There's essentially right-left coalitions, and what we had as well, and this I thought was very important, were validators in the government, people in the government who were willing to say,

we think that these media consolidation rules are bad, and so here you have two of the five commissioners, Commissioner Copps and Adelstein, two Democrats. They said, this is such an important rule for our democracy that we should go out and hear what the public thinks, because in the US, if the decision is made in Washington, DC, it's usually made

by a few corporate lobbyists who get paid a lot of money by big companies and have really expensive suits, but if you want to do anything for the public, you really need to inform the public, get them on your side, get a public outcry, right? Transparency in an organization is really important, so these two Democrats, along with the help of Free Press

would go across the country to hearings, and they would begin by saying, where's Michael Powell? Where's Michael Powell? Oh, Michael Powell, he's in DC surrounded by lobbyists, so having a cigar in a smoke-filled room, eating a steak, we're here with the people. And that was effective, so.

And so, in order to organize the public, you couldn't organize these hearings by taking out ads in the newspaper or the TV stations. They didn't want to cover this because they favored Michael Powell's rule. They wanted to make more money by merging. So the way we organized, and this changed everything in that movement, was through the internet.

We used the internet to organize people and inform them about the threat to democracy that we saw with media, okay? And this has changed everything for, there were years of being Sisyphus, pushing a rock up and falling, but having the internet, having these people really helped, really helped fight the insiders in DC.

Having these people, right? Liberty waits your fingers, bloggers, right? They were helpful. So, that was our first success, organizing people, getting some action in Congress,

and then winning in court, okay? And that was where Free Press was born. The next big fight was network neutrality. Now, back in the early 2000s, there was a lot of bad stuff going on, right? There was this president we had who kept making bad decisions, right? Got us into this war in Iraq and other wars,

and deregulated the financial sector, which led to economic collapse, although there's more to blame than that. But he also helped ruin, or his regulators helped ruin our broadband policies. We get back to Michael Powell, FCC chairman. FCC chairman has a big decision to make.

How do we regulate internet in the US? What should we do? So, here's the legal question. What is the internet? Is the internet like the telephone network, or is the internet like, or sorry, is providing access to the internet, like Comcast and AT&T and these phone and cable companies

selling you access to the internet, is that like a phone network, or is that like Twitter? And if it's like Twitter, we're not gonna regulate it, and if it's like the phone network, it has to be regulated under the Communications Act under Title II. And so if you don't believe in regulation,

like Michael Powell did, you say, sure, providing access to the internet is just like Twitter. We don't have to regulate anything the phone and cable companies do. It's fine. It's unregulated. And we see, in law, as a lawyer, you see this all the time. Two different categories, and some new thing comes along. Which category does it fall into?

So, think of it as one would be regulated, one would not. In the U.S., there were these new financial products called CDOs that looked like insurance, and if they'd been insurance, they would've been regulated, and our economy went out of collapse, but we thought they were not insurance.

Imagine two categories of torture and not torture, and you're trying to define some action that the U.S. government is doing as either torture, regulated, or not torture and not regulated. So that's what happened. You had, is it network or Twitter? And we went with, it's Twitter. So, it was destruction by definition,

defining something to destroy something. So one thing that was eliminated was open access. So open access is a term used in the U.S. to mean having your choice of internet service provider. And so in the U.S., there was a time

when you could choose your own internet service provider. You'd have a phone company, maybe AT&T, but then you could choose an internet service provider like AOL, Earthlink, Juno, some other company that provide you internet access. Now, because of this ruling, the phone companies require you to use their ISP.

So there's no choice of internet service provider. You use your phone company's ISP or your cable company's ISP. You have one choice or the other. So once the phone and cable company had this market lock and you couldn't choose any other ISP, they said, okay, now we're gonna take over the internet.

Now we're gonna decide what to do with the internet. So immediately there was, there were these sort of, the way I started to think, the way we explain net neutrality to people was using one of several metaphors, right? So one, the phone companies, especially AT&T, wanted to have two different lanes on the internet.

A fast lane for websites that paid AT&T or Comcast money and then, so this is AT&T and their fast lane and their partner companies. And this is the slow lane that you would get if you're just a blogger or just an average person

and don't have the money to negotiate deals with every phone company and cable company across the country and across the world. Right now, the internet, you make something like Twitter and it's available everywhere. You don't have to make deals with every phone and cable company and pay them off, okay? So the idea is that the internet would be more

sort of like a medium where you get, where the provider chooses who you get, right? So here's another metaphor we would use which was the internet as cable TV, right? You get to choose your channels. For 29.99 a month, you get these channels. For 39, you also get these channels. And then for 49 a month, you get premium channels, right?

So that's sort of the model that they'd be happy with. Another model is the App Store. So the way the App Store works is that if you wanna be an app on, I know in the US, on the Verizon network, you go to Verizon or to whatever device maker it is

and you get your app approved for that network. And you do that to every network. You don't just get your app available across the world like the internet. And when you get your app approved by every single carrier, you have to give them a cut, usually a third. So this is what they want. They want everyone to have to get approval

to be on the internet and then give them a third of whatever you make which would really stifle innovation, right? A lot of technologies on the internet that you use were sort of accidental. They didn't get funded until after they were successful. eBay was a weekend project. Google was a thesis project. Yahoo was a bibliographical project.

Twitter was an accident that was a sky-side project while he was working on this one company that failed. So a lot of companies that really provide a lot of value to your life. Facebook was apparently a way for this guy to meet women. And had he had to give a third, we would never have Facebook. So, all right, and one final metaphor

is they often talk about congestion. Like the internet is so congested that we, the phone and cable companies, have to manage who uses the internet when and to do that we have to start charging people because we've got to manage all of these people trying to use the internet. It turns out from everything I've learned in this fight

that generally it's cheaper to just build more capacity. Think of your computers. Your computers get twice as fast every two years. There are all these new fast things you want to use on your computer. Your computer doesn't decide pre-approved applications

and charge people to be able to use the bandwidth. They just make it faster because that's cheaper. That's how technology works. And when it comes to the internet, it could be the same exact thing. You just make it cheaper and faster every year. But they don't want to just make it faster every year because they want scarcity. They want a few slots that they can then auction off

to the highest bidder and make as much money as they can. So my example of scarcity is a handful of diamonds. Why is that? Because there are a lot of diamonds in the world, apparently, like so many diamonds that if you sold them all they'd be very cheap. But there's a company that controls all those diamonds

and they sell only a few a year so that they're really expensive. They make money from scarcity. Because they sell only a few diamonds, they can sell them for thousands and thousands. And that's what the phone and cable companies in the US want to do. They want to profit from scarcity, not from abundance and capacity.

So in the US, that's the biggest cable company. It has like half of the broadband subscribers, I think, or a huge number. And then AT&T is another, like the biggest phone company. And so decisions, decisions means in the US you have a choice of two ISPs,

your phone company or your cable company. And both of them want to block your internet. So in 2006 was when this fight began in the US and that was when Free Press organized this group called Save the Internet, involved 800 groups. It was all nonprofits or small businesses. There was another coalition that included corporations

like Google, eBay, Amazon. A note about Free Press. Free Press takes no corporate money. Free Press is just by the people, for the people, gets foundation money and individual contributions. So here was our example of strange bedfellows.

And so the Christian coalition, I don't know if you've heard of them, the Christian coalition is a very conservative, very religious, usually Republican group. Move On is a very liberal, a very effective liberal group. The fact that these two agree on anything is, in the US, it looked like people's heads would explode.

And this was just, and this is a New York Times ad to show everyone, Christian coalition, move on, save the internet, that people across the spectrum care about an open internet, mainly for democracy reasons, the ability to communicate and spread their message. So another thing that we benefited from

in the Save the Internet movement was bloggers. And the weird thing is, this guy here, Matt Stoller, was our lead blogger, and he organized all the other bloggers. And it was essentially amazing that one person could do so much for us.

And so every Sunday, he used to organize a group of people, bloggers in general on lots of different issues. And he had credibility among the community, and a lot of them would follow what he would do on net neutrality. And he organized a lot of people, both in Congress and in the blogging community.

So during the 2006 campaign, what happened was there was almost a law in the US against net neutrality. So we had to organize people to stop that law. We did that with organizing Save the Internet, organizing groups, organizing companies, organizing the blog community. And then we had an opportunity.

And usually opportunities used to come along all the time, but we didn't have an apparatus to take advantage of them. And the opportunity was that this guy named Ted Stevens said something kind of crazy. Ted Stevens was the senator who was in charge of the committee in Congress that regulates the internet. And he said, the internet is not just something

you dump something on. It's not a big truck, it's a series of tubes. And he said that, I don't know if you've ever seen or heard of that. Tubes, right, tubes. He said that after the net neutrality amendment that we proposed destroyed his bill.

It was during this long 10-minute rant where he just said crazy stuff. And everyone else in the room who's a reporter and been in D.C. a long time thought he didn't say anything exceptional. This is just usual. Senators saying crazy things for 10 minutes when they're mad. What's the big deal? And then one of our allies put it on the internet.

And then other people in the country could see that this is the crazy person in charge of regulating our internet. He's crazy. And this was all over the place. People were realizing based on this speech. And this was on the Daily Show of Jon Stewart. People were realizing often, the clips on the Daily Show are really funny, that something is going on.

And we were able to jump on that and show the enemies of net neutrality for not knowing what they were talking about. So at the end of this fight, we organized millions of people. And we had hearings in Congress. And it was really an amazing left-right organizational coalition, a corporate, non-corporate coalition.

We had to muster all the power we could from every source possible, the press, the bloggers, in order to stop this bill. This is the height of the power of corporations in the U.S. really. And then from August 2007 to August 2006 to August 2007, not much happened.

These are crickets. Not much happened in net neutrality. Everyone was watching and wondering. The phone and cable companies thought if they started violating net neutrality, a law might pass. And we knew we couldn't get a law passed unless they did something bad. So everyone was sort of waiting for a year. And then the famous Comcast case begins.

And it begins with this guy named Rob Topolski. Rob is the guy on my right with the red hair and the beard. Rob Topolski loves barbershop quartet. I don't know if you've seen barbershop quartet. It's like four guys singing in these get-ups,

in these clothes. And Rob happened to love barbershop quartet. He happened to be a brilliant network engineer who understood and tested networks. He also was dying of cancer. So he had a cancer in his stomach

that was the size of a small American football. And because he was sick and couldn't work, this brilliant network engineer was out of a job, had nothing to do. And he was on medication, so he was never sleeping. So brilliant network engineer, dying of cancer,

never sleeping. They had surgery and he's still alive. And so he tries to upload barbershop quartet music. It doesn't work. He wonders what's going on. He's using BitTorrent and other peer-to-peer technologies, but it doesn't work.

And so BitTorrent, what happens is he's trying to upload to the network and then other people could get his barbershop quartets. And these, by the way, were from the 1890s. So they were totally legitimate in terms of copyright. And so as it turned out, Comcast was blocking his ability to upload these songs.

And the only reason we found out is because magically this amazing network engineer was trying and was out of work and had nothing better to do and was up all night so he could test his connection all the time, try to figure out why isn't this working. And it turned out it was Comcast. And the funny thing is, later people said, don't worry, if the phone and cable company is blocked,

you guys will figure it out. And I said the only reason we figured it out was because of a miracle of this one guy who happened to be there and not have a job. Usually people like that have jobs. So, at least in that economy. So Comcast, it turns out, was blocking his connection. And when the Associated Press did a study, they did this study with the King James Bible.

And so we would always say, Comcast blocks the Bible. So that's where I come in, right? And so I happened to be a young lawyer at Free Press. I just began, I had a professorship lined up and I deferred the professorship for a year. And someone called me and said,

hey, I can't write, we should file a complaint against Comcast. We should see if we can get the FCC to do anything. I'm going on break, can you write this? So I said, okay, sure, I'll write it. That's how it began. And so, we actually won this case. And it's kind of another miracle that we won this case

in the US system, considering the political power of the cable and phone companies that we won. So how did we win? Did we win because I have a big brain? No. Did we win because I studied really well? This was one of my professors, right?

I have a big degree, just like everyone else in Washington, D.C. No one cares that I have good ideas. I'm a professor, no one cares. And even though I'm not that smart, we have other smart people. But still, it doesn't matter that we have all these smart people, right?

Even Barbara Von Shevik, as smart as she is, is not enough to win. Although this helps, right? We were able to convince the FCC chairman, a Republican, based on, you know, Barbara is an engineer, an economics expert, and a lawyer. Based on engineering, legal analysis, economic analysis, we essentially made the argument that, hey,

if you want to be the person who destroys the internet, who undermines innovation and competition in the U.S., who does to the internet sector what your friends did to the economic and banking sector, sure. But here's what we think, you know, we think this is a better idea. So we were able to sort of convince the Republican chairman that he should go with us

and what Comcast did was wrong. But there's no way we could have actually won without having more than just good ideas. And so in D.C., right, we have these big powerful companies that, you know, it's like invasion of the body snatchers. They tell the, you know, they inspect the politicians

and politicians do what they want, right? And so the only way to win was sort of this inside, outside idea, right? These people made it possible, right? We had to convince the chairman that we were doing the right thing with the best analysis we had. But he could not have stood up to those companies

and his party, right, without having the public standing with him. He needed lots of political pressure. He needed to be able to say, the only, look, I've got to rule against Comcast because those people will lynch me. Look at what a big political problem we're gonna have. And if we didn't have these people, we would have never been able to have the political cover

for even the Democrats to do the right thing against those powerful companies. So let me explain what we had because it's kind of helpful in just this campaign as an example, right? And hopefully in Europe you guys will have a lot more. But we really had just about five or six people

doing all the work on this case against, you know, dozens of lobbyists, dozens of lawyers, these think tanks that the phone and cable companies buy. They buy think tanks and put people there and their only job is to attack me and my friends and to go to my friends' blogs

and say mean things in the comments. You know, like if a friend said, Marvin Amore is speaking at Republica, these people would go into the comments and say, Marvin Amore is a terrible person. He's evil. He works for Google. He's not really a consumer advocate. And so, you know, there's all these people. And we just had a few. So here's the first guy, my blogger friend, the translator.

So he was able to organize lots of people and also just to message it in a way that people could understand. So I am just a geeky lawyer, right? I don't know how to explain things to normal people. And so I needed him. And so I remember we had a blogger call and on the blogger call was me, Barbara Von Shevik,

who is, I always call her very German, right? She's very thorough, very, you know, she's very, very precise and, you know, very like geeky, the two of us. And so there was a point where I said, oh, I'm deeply troubled by what Comcast is doing. And he said, wait a minute, let me translate this for everyone, you geek.

They're lying. They're lying and they're blocking your speech. They're bad people. They should be punished. And I said, that's great. That's good to know. Thank you, man. So he was very helpful. We had a press secretary who was exceptional. She's now the press secretary

of the chairman of the FCC in the US. And she's just unstoppable. She was working all the time and was just brilliant, reading every piece of news late at night, watching where the trends were, working with me to try to message, just really important that we were able to tell our story. And I'm not, you know,

a lot of you are probably really good at quotes, like zinging quotes that go in the press. I wasn't so good at quotes, but I could help explain things. So the story usually was okay. And she was, and we needed a press operation to get the public involved. And the way it works in the US is that the congressmen and the Federal Communications Commission,

they don't talk to each other. They read the news and figure out what the other one's doing. So we had to make sure the news was capturing things. I also had a researcher, this 24 year old kid who was also a fanatic who would just research everything. So I didn't know anything about the internet. I was a First Amendment, I knew about the internet,

but I was a First Amendment democracy person. And a lot of these technologies and the business practices, I didn't know. And so I needed a researcher who was always like letting me know how facts worked, like what was actually going on. And then we had the political guy, right? And this was very helpful because when the blogger and the press person

is out there trying to figure out what to do to engage the public, it's helpful to have the political guy who knows, look, these are the 10 people on the committee. Don't worry about all the other senators. These 10 people matter. And then on the committee, we've got these four people who are good with us, these three who are on the fence, these three will never get. So let's try to have our outreach

to have arguments that'll appeal to these three and also in their communities. So we were able to target our limited resources based on the fact that Ben knew where we could be most effective. So this is the benefit of the inside-outside game of people talking to each other, of me spending every Sunday with the bloggers and every day with them, right?

So essentially there were five of us doing this, plus all of them, which really helped because sometimes people would call me and say, hey, I used to work for Comcast. Let me tell you some more that you don't know. That was great. That was helpful. Okay, so here's what I'm gonna skip even though I'm a lawyer. I'm skipping the law.

So we made legal arguments. We made economic arguments. We made policy arguments. And I can give you examples. But I'm gonna skip that because the most interesting part was how did we actually get the FCC to do the right thing based on the law and in the face of these people?

And I just explained mainly how we did it was press, blogging, organizing people as much as we can. People don't listen to me because they think I'm smart. There are lots of smart people. People listen to me because I was speaking for millions of people who cared and people have been organized. So let me give you an example

of how we were able to organize people. The FCC, learning from the years of the media reform movement around media ownership, decided to have a hearing. And the hearing, they had two hearings. And this one is the hearing they had at Harvard. They went up to Harvard Law School and they had a hearing and they invited

all the engineers from MIT who helped invent the internet and they invited some policy experts and they wanted to get testimony to learn about the issues. And they also wanted to, so here's some experts, David Reed, chief IP architect, father of Reed's Law, hero to the movement, and here's him explaining

how internet packets work. It's on an envelope, IP headers, it's all right there. So here are some of the people who testified that day. They had me as sort of the witness in the opposition, Benkler, the chief advisor for Comcast, chief advisor for Verizon, the big phone company,

Tim Wu, and then Chris, professor for the phone and cable companies, right? And so we had all these experts. We also wanted to get the public involved. So here's the public. All these people showed up to the hearing. There was hundreds of people who came to the hearing. All these students from MIT and Harvard Law School

couldn't get into the hearing because so many people had showed up to the hearing. It was so crowded. How did so many people show up and why were they sleeping? Well, it turns out Comcast paid them. So here's the picture of that woman paying these people who were sitting in the crowd. So this was really rude to Harvard.

And so the way the press works, the newspapers work in the US usually, is you report one side and you report the other side. And even if one side is clearly wrong and false, you've done your balance. And so they reported one side. Free Press says they paid people to sit in the crowd

and it was really rude to Harvard and an insult to the FCC. First they were blocking the internet, now they're blocking the public. On the other side, Comcast said, no, no, no, those were our employees and they just got in on a bus at 7 a.m. and fell asleep. And so finally the Harvard people just broke the tie

and said, no, no, no, those people were not Comcast employees, they were paid people who got in there and it was an insult. So at that point, we took this story and we knew that a lot of people in Congress didn't understand net neutrality, didn't understand the internet, but we knew they did understand that a company doing this had done something wrong.

So we sent this all over the place. So we had another opportunity we could jump on. And so another thing we did is we just rode Comcast as hard as we could. Every day we would attack them. Every day we would isolate them, we would attack them. It was a constant drum beat. It was just pounding them.

Stuff would come up all the time, they would try something. If they punched us in one press cycle, we punched them back immediately in that same press cycle. Somebody in a story later said that we were riding them like a person who needed a good pair of stirrups. We did not let them go. We were not gonna lose that case. So if you let up for even a minute,

these guys will not let up, they'll get away. So, oh, and then, so Free Press was doing this, the public was helping, and then randomly, out of the blue, people started doing interesting, innovative stuff, right? I don't know if you ever saw this, someone made this cool kind of clip.

I will make love to every virgin who defends the internet. It's not true, but still kind of funny. And everyone sent it to their friends. And they said, oh, what's this Comcast thing going on? Right, and this guy, Rob, right? Rob was just some dude. He was just some dude in Oregon. It was raining a lot and he was sick. So he published the fact that Comcast is blocking people.

Then he testified at Stanford. Then he became one of my chief advisors when I call him all the time. You know, how does the internet work, I don't know. And he would tell me, right? So, and then somebody else who was important was the Republican at the time, the chairman of the FCC, Kevin Martin.

He had to do the right thing. And in the face of tons of political pressure, he did the right thing. And that's something that you can't always control. Sometimes in the face of political pressure, they do the wrong thing. You've got to do everything you can to make it clear to them that they will hurt the country and they will go down in history as people who have hurt the country.

And they've got political support right now. You've got enough political support from the public that you can stand up to the big companies, was the hope. So the FCC ruled in our favor. All they did is they told Comcast to stop. They didn't find them. They just made a legal ruling essentially saying we were right and the internet should be open and free. And people were really excited.

This is how excited I was. This is me reading the decision for the first time. We were really happy. Another person who mattered was Obama. Obama was on the net neutrality bill, supported net neutrality very early on. And this is actually an interesting lesson. Very early on, Obama was pro net neutrality.

He realized that the internet was important for him to organize. He did a lot of online organizing. He thought it mattered for democracy. We got him on record early. He was a co-sponsor. And the blogger I mentioned, Matt, he got all of the, I think, incoming democratic senators to agree to net neutrality while they were campaigning.

So once somebody gets elected, they don't need you as much. When they're running for office for the first time especially, you get them on record. You say, hey, do you support net neutrality? Hi, I'm a blogger calling. I have lots of friends who raise money on the internet and who communicate on the internet.

We love the internet, do you? And so getting those people on record early. And Obama, that's not how it happened with Obama. Obama has always been a big net neutrality supporter. But having him supporting net neutrality was very helpful as a shadow. So recently, on April 6th, there was a court decision.

Comcast took the FCC to court over the case. And what they said was, hey, FCC, don't you remember what Michael Powell did? Michael Powell had two categories. One category was phone network. One category was Twitter. And he said, we're like Twitter. Therefore, you can't regulate us, right?

And so the court said, yeah, that's right. Michael Powell screwed you, essentially. And what happened is if you're regulating the internet like it's Twitter, you can't regulate Twitter. We're not gonna let you start regulating Comcast and then Facebook and then Twitter, right?

You're gonna have to change your framework and redo what Michael Powell did. You're gonna have to undo all that mess in order to regulate net neutrality. So that's what happened recently. Essentially, the FCC has to reverse what Powell did. Which means, here's a picture of the DC circuit.

The DC circuit is a very ideological, right wing conservative circuit. I knew we were gonna lose right when we had to go to that court, right? So what does this mean that we lost that case? All that means is that we have educated the public on net neutrality.

We had a big fight that was helpful. And here's one thing I learned, which was fights are good. Fights are good for the public because one, if my group is fighting and bloggers are fighting for something, the public knows that you're on their side. You're fighting the cable and phone companies.

They know they hate the phone and cable companies. They know they get charged too much in the US. They know that the phone and cable companies wanna block their speech and you're on their side. And the only way to get a lot of coverage and to get people interested is for there to be a big fight to watch and to be a part of. And so a lot of times people think,

oh no, no, let's not fight those big companies. Let's try to negotiate with them. You're not gonna negotiate with them without the public on your side. You're gonna lose. So what you want is you want a big fight against a big enemy to get the public involved to sort of give you a chance. So fights are good for you, right? But so all that's gonna happen now is we're gonna have another fight.

This fight is gonna be about reversing the Powell decisions so that we can do net neutrality. So this guy is gonna be the source of the decision. He's the FCC chairman now. He's one of Obama's friends from law school. They used to play basketball together. He's very pro net neutrality supposedly, right? But he's not super aggressive.

He's not in favor of reversing Powell's elimination of open access and letting competing ISPs fight. The pressure of these guys or just arguments, he's not in favor of open access.

He proposed something for net neutrality which had a lot of loopholes in it, right? So essentially, we're gonna have to make space for this guy to do the right thing. And I wanted to give this example of an argument we hear in the US all the time.

So right now in the US, you hear this argument which is don't do net neutrality because if you do net neutrality, our economy is already bad. If our economy is bad already, you don't want to make it worse. Companies won't invest. Just let the phone and cable companies make more money, be good. We have more jobs. But back when the economy was doing well, what you heard was don't mess with the economy.

It's going so well, right? So no matter what, if the economy is going well or not, don't regulate, right? We have the same arguments about tax cuts, right? We have a surplus, give people their money back. Or we have a budget deficit, we should cut more taxes, right? Or no, the economy is bad, let's cut more taxes.

So, all right. DC, so in order to win this fight, you need not only this, you need this, you need this. You need to organize through this and through other ways. These people, couldn't do it without these people. So you use the internet to save the internet.

So how much time do I have left? What time is it? Seven minutes is it? All right. All right, I'll take questions now. I was gonna give some benefits of the fight, right? All of us sort of grew, we made new friends.

It was an interesting challenge. They got better, they started hiring this guy to attack us instead of these people, right? So it was interesting. It's a beautiful, fulfilling life. We had a lot of fun. So, all right, questions?

Go ahead. Yeah, it's a few weeks ago.

So the FCC decision in 2008 said Comcast could not interfere with peer-to-peer protocols the way they had been doing it and told them to stop. The 2010 decision said the FCC doesn't have the authority to regulate Comcast if the FCC regulates Comcast

as though it's Twitter. So it overruled the case that we won at the FCC. On appeal, yes, we lost. So yeah, we lost on appeal, right? And that was a few weeks ago. So but what this shows is that there'll be another fight and the next fight will be to change

the Powell definitions from Twitter to a network and then do net neutrality. So another fight is beginning again. The FCC, it's, oh, well, the highest court decision, what they said was, because Michael Powell defined the internet to be like Twitter and not like the phone network,

you can't impose net neutrality on something like Twitter. So go back and change the initial decision by Powell saying that the internet is like Twitter and not like a phone network. So if the FCC goes back and changes that old decision, they can then probably do net neutrality, okay?

Go ahead. Oh, sure. And then discriminate,

except when we have to discriminate because Hollywood asks yet. So can you tell us if you can precisely trace this back to Hollywood and how you think we can someday circumvent this or does it mean the end of it?

Okay, so the, we'll call it the Hollywood exception for you. The Hollywood exception is the idea that net neutrality as a rule would require the phone and cable companies and the ISPs to not discriminate against or for any content, except when there's unlawful content like copyrighted material.

So in the US, the reason why politically there's that exception, I think, is because the Democrats tend to be close to Hollywood and Hollywood seems to think that it's a good idea to have the phone and cable companies policing copyright for them. And we have tried in the US to convince

the Hollywood companies that it's a bad idea and it won't do anything. What's gonna happen is everyone will start using Tor and encryption and avoid those blocks for copyright, which will make it harder for security, things like that. And so we haven't had much traction.

And so the Hollywood exception could do one of two things. One, it could actually reduce piracy, right? But probably what it will do was it will encourage people to use encryption. It'll probably require people, the phone and cable companies to start spying, result in more blocking, less blocking.

So it's an issue. And why is it such an important interest? In the US, we happen to be net copyright exporters, I think, and the political argument has been winning. In terms of my advice for how to win that,

I think you need other politically powerful allies. You need the technology companies that think copyright's gone too far. You need, in the US, some phone companies seem to believe that they shouldn't become copyright police. Verizon doesn't wanna be the copyright police. They get all these exceptions and benefits

from not being liable for copyright. They don't wanna have to start policing it. So mainly you need other politically powerful people and you need a movement of individuals. So I'm guessing we're out of time. If there's one more question, I'll take it.

Otherwise, you guys can talk to me afterward. I'll be here the whole time. And it's marvin.omori at Gmail or I'm available elsewhere on the internet. All right, thank you everyone.