Gadgetory

it's no secret that broadband in America is a problem repenting a lot more money but service and speeds are staying about the same that's getting better but not fast enough and a lot of people have ideas on how to make it better one of those people is Susan Crawford professor at the benjamin cardozo school of law she just came back to New York after a stint as President Obama's special adviser on science technology and innovation and she also served on Mayor Bloomberg's Council on technology innovation she's the author of book on telecom monopolies called captive audience she has a lot of ideas on how to fix it i'm here with susan crawford law professor and author of captive audience which is basically a book about how comcast taking over the world uh it's an argument to by comcast stock yeah I mean fundamental needs you you argue very precisely in the book that they can't be stopped I'm awfully well hey they are doing well why is that well it is a great American success story I mean it's fantastic and these are fantastic managers they're really good at running this business they're very calm very stately but you know so with Standard Oil that was a fantastic business too and it's great for them but if you can control a commodity that everybody in the country needs and you can set the prices for it and decide what quality you deliver it at and then you can just divide markets and say alright you take Minneapolis I'll take Chicago and make deals with your brethren and then just keep grinding out profits and then not upgrade that's what really gets me exercised about this the more than eighty-five percent of the country is stuck with cable modem service for high-speed Internet access very expensive compared to other countries and second-rate it's not fiber it's not fiber and so I would love to see if you're going to have a big provider of high-speed internet access it needs to be subject to either competition or oversight these guys have neither and I want to see the country compete in the 21st century this is not just about consumers watching video or you know anxious anxieties about who's filtering out what internet access this is about the country's ability to keep up with other nations and I'm really concerned broadband interacts s high speed and access is you are you that it's effectively utility like electricity or water but we don't regulate it like that what's the barrier I think a lot of our readers would say tell you that of course it's required but you can get here you cannot get it right well here's what happened exactly the same story for electricity so it used to be controlled by a whole series of private trust these giant companies no oversight nothing FDR comes into office he said no everybody in America should have a connection to electricity at a reasonable price it doesn't happen by magic it actually takes government policy to make this possible and so that's what I'm so hopeful about this issue because your generation you know our saw you on the stuff I just start going to get this yeah in this context for you to say that you're hopeful about the government doing anything yep seems extremely foolish and I you know I'm an advocate of net neutrality I enjoyed the book thoroughly but I have no hope that our government will accomplishing these goals well there's government whose government I'm totally focused on mayor's these days I've given up on federal policy for the time being the wife of the mayor because mayor's our sovereigns mayor's can act they have control over their rights of way they can say we need fiber in our area so I I've met a bunch of them the mayor and fluffy at Louisiana tells this great story his grandmother thought of electricity as they called it the light bill because that's all she could imagine electricity being used for so he says we need to use our electrical utility to bring fibre to laugh at and he's a Republican it's not a you know left-right issue it's essential and so everybody there has a really fast connection a really low cost Chattanooga Tennessee the mayor there says the most important thing he's ever done in Chattanooga's make sure that there's fiber access for everybody 70 bucks a month so he says that's important why I mean I know why yeah a lot of maybe verge readers know why but the wider community of people in America don't necessarily know why there's no immediate benefit to getting faster than access in your home other than you're going to get netflix a little bit faster right well think about the electricity analogy okay if you only think it's good for the light bill and you can't imagine that you could plug other devices at your house and run let's say a refrigerator or a dishwasher same thing with very high speed fiber access we don't even know yet what it's going to be used for we do know that presence humans actually being able to talk to each other requires really low latency really high capacity networks and what you make presents possible using these networks all kinds of things become possible things like health care at a distance education at a distance not just sort of dialing into some classroom but actually doing it advanced manufacturing all this stuff makes is possible new businesses Kansas City is interesting right because yeah time warner's they're screaming from the rooftops we've always offered this service you could always get they never offered a gigabit 470 bucks a month but why is it that they're not seeing these things happen right the big dominant incumbents are saying they're not upgrading people that are chart there grinding away they're costing the same why don't they see that if they partner with local communities and big cities whatever that they will get a flood of new customers what's holding them back profit-making just the way an ordinary business Frances think say they can milk their existing investments forever they could make more and more money out of the existing infrastructure why would you upgrade why would you lower prices if you've got a complete control of a market you've got the richest customers you're charging the more and more and more using programming using local sports a lot of the time and you've got them in a vice grip and you then you can set tears and do more price discrimination it's a great business for them they have no incentive to change now in provo where Google showing up Comcast suddenly for seventy dollars a month offers 250 down 50 up fast internet access nowhere else in the country does comcast do that why do they do to provo because competition competition we just were so unused to this idea that it would like competition how does that happen yeah and so whatever we can do in these cities to set this yardstick to say great cheap service should exist it's incredibly important and I'm really excited about the possibility with 20 more cities you know that get online and find a way to bring fiber then every other mayor gets jealous you have to say every time a street is ripped up in any one of the five boroughs put conduit there every time kinda was put in it should reach each building around there build the laterals every time just kind of it should be shared even if our eyes and takes part of it make sure that a competitor gets in there the city really gets in this way by charging extraordinarily high franchise fees for competitive fiber providers that's ridiculous they did is not a money-making venture it should be that everybody gets this how do you deal with the wireless carriers who have very little competition who are pointing repeatedly to smartphones as a massive success of competition whether or not you believe that's true but that's the deal right and who are saying if you regulate us you'll kill this look at what just happened without your help wireless is a more competitive marketplace than the wired marketplace I'm focusing on but these two things are complementary fiber policy is wireless policy get more fiber throughout the country and you've got much more Wi-Fi all kinds of things that could spring off of that they it's true that sprint and t-mobile are giving 18 teen browse more of a run for their money right now and it's true that LT is everywhere but it's it's such a capped compressed service it's great for mobility but it's complementary with Annie it's not a substitute and nobody in South Korea would ever start a business using a smartphone and not having a wire at home same thing here so what are the next steps with on the local and the kind of larger macro national level beyond just making everybody jealous well what are the concrete things are like actual people can be oh no question so what thing I'm going to do with my life and my limited time on earth is make sure that I can help mayor's understand best practices across these different cities never act in a vacuum share lots of information maybe act as a buying cooperative when it comes to getting equipment in place mounting the political campaigns that's so important and what people can do in each city is give their mayor air cover say we're going to vote on this basis we're going to make sure that the people who represent us understand that we need this X as a reasonable cause it's interestingly your focus on mayor's that's what I'm come back to it because how do you do that without a strong federal policy throughout the country here's why you go to every state in every city yeah a secret plan is each city gets in this we roll back the terrible state laws that prevent cities from acting on fiber networks gradually it's going to take a lot there 19 of them that creates a patchwork that makes everybody jealous and switches the expectation so that at the federal level even the people who seem incapable of moving now yeah change the policy but they we don't make progress really until you can see something in America right now we don't see how badly we're doing make that visible by using the mirrors it's a first step is not the last step what was professor professor thank you very much nice to meet you they're fun to talk to you