FCC's Net Neutrality Pie, Global Health and Tech –– Talking Tech w/ Ferras Vinh & Anne LaFond
In light of the swirling energy around net neutrality, Brian brings in CDT's Policy Counsel for our Open Internet Project Ferras Vinh to break down what Chairman Pai's efforts mean, whether your an ISP, an internet company or service, or a regular user. <br><br>Then Brian chats with Anne LaFond of the John Show, Inc. to discuss the ever important, often overlooked impact of technology and the internet on global health.<br><br>What Unraveling Net Neutrality Rules Means for Users: http://bit.ly/2qAQapQ<br>CDT press release re: FCC efforts against net neutrality: http://bit.ly/2pZBC72<br><br>JSI's work on information systems development: http://bit.ly/2qGkRtT<br>JSI's overview of information and communications tech: http://bit.ly/2pyq2yn<br>JSI case study on the use of human centered design: http://bit.ly/2oYVk2P ...and the results: http://bit.ly/2pyucXf<br><br>More info on Ferras: http://bit.ly/2qt3aS2<br>More info on Anne: http://bit.ly/2qA8AYU<br>More info on our host, Brian: bit.ly/cdtbrian<br><br>Attribution: sounds used from Psykophobia, Taira Komori, BenKoning, Zabuhailo, bloomypetal, guitarguy1985, bmusic92, and offthesky of freesound.org.
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- technology 0.007
- neutrality 0.007
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Transcript
Welcome to Tech Talk. Bye. CT.
Tea.
Welcome to CDT's Tech Talk, where we dish on tech and Internet policy, while also explaining what these policies mean to our daily lives. I'm Brian Wasilowski, and it's time to talk tech. For those who thought the net neutrality debate was settled when broadband Internet services were reclassified by the FCC under title two, you were sorely mistaken. New FCC chairman, Ajit Pai, is gunning for the strong open Internet rules and wants to overturn the title two protections. We'll discuss the chairman's proposal and talk about what it means for ISPs, small businesses, and the everyday Internet user. After that, we'll be talking about technology and global health. When trying to address an issue as complicated as improving health globally, data and technology can play a huge role in informing the best approaches. Today, we'll talk about ways that one leading international development NGO is leveraging data to help make the world healthier. Ajit Pai is making waves in his first few months on the job as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. And while it was Republicans in Congress who dramatically overturned the broadband privacy rules by using a congressional review act provision, it's chairman Pai who is opening up the net neutrality debate and seeking to roll back the strong title two approach to ensuring an open Internet. With all this action happening at the FCC, it's a very, very good thing that CDT has a new open Internet policy council to advocate for Internet users and fight for strong net neutrality provisions. Faraz, Vinh is that new policy council, and he's here to share the latest with us on Chairman Pai's recent proposal. Welcome, Faraz. Hi, Brian. Thanks for having me. This is exactly how you wanted to, like, launch your CDD career, join Tech Talk. Right? Yes. Thrown right into the public eye. This is definitely what I was looking for. You were meant to be in the public eye. So here we go. So first, before we get to Chairman Pai's plans, there was at least, you know, on the net neutrality front, a pretty nice recent win,
in US telecom versus FCC. Can you tell us a little bit about that case, what that meant? Yeah. Sure. So to give you guys a little bit of background, this has been an ongoing case since around 2015. Right? So after the open Internet order was implemented in 2015 and that neutrality safeguards are a part of that, the telecom companies pretty much challenged them right away in court, arguing that the FCC did not have the authority to treat broadband Internet like a utility and that the FCC failed to adequately explain why they implemented the rules. Last June, the DC Circuit found in favor of the FCC, holding that the agency sufficiently explained that it had the authority to do so through the open Internet order. The telecom companies appealed, asking for what's known as an on bank review. It's asking for what's known as an on bank review. It's a review of the case by all the judges on the DC Circuit Court. This Monday, and this is the recent news, the DC Circuit denied that appeal, finding once again that the agency does have the authority to protect consumers and ISPs. And this is the more this is the more novel point to this, that ISPs do not have a first amendment right to block or degrade access to the Internet. So this is this is a relatively new argument, this idea that, that somehow net neutrality protections are some sort of first amendment infringement on the rights of ISPs. But if you're an ISP and you're holding yourself open to to providing open Internet access for all people, you don't have an open you don't have a First Amendment right to mislead the public about that fact. Right? So in in this decision, I think one one of the more noteworthy takeaways is the fact that the court struck down,
this argument moving forward. And I think this is something that that may come up again. Oh, alright. Well, it's good to have a win. So let's turn to our our potential not wins right now. But first, remind everyone, so the open Internet rules were enacted under Chairman Wheeler, and they moved to Title two classification. What exactly are these rules? What do they mean just for people who have perhaps not been following it as closely as we do here at CDT?
Sure. So when we're talking about net neutrality, we're really talking about three basic rules of the road. Right? This idea that, first of all, no blocking. You can't block access to a website or service. No throttling. You can't, slow down or degrade access to a website or a service. And finally, it's something called something called no paid prioritization. And this is the idea that you can't require websites or services to pay more to get access to the network. Right? It's this idea that everyone should be working on a level ground, equal playing field. And these are all principles that are based on this general idea of a free and open Internet for everyone. Cool.
So title two, strong, puts those in place. Chairman Pai wants to shift it to title one. Like, this is all pretty wonky. Title one, title two, what's the big difference here and why would we obviously at CDT oppose this reclassification or this re reclassification,
I guess, as the case may be? So in in strict legal terms, what the FCC is trying to do, what chairman Pai is trying to do, is he's trying to reclassify broadband Internet from something called a title two telecommunication service to a title one information service. And I'm gonna break this down a little bit further. Go for it. You know, it's it's much easier to explain what this means in terms of the protections that people will lose as a result of the switch than trying to, like, break down the actual legal interfaces here. Right? So under title two, common carriers must act in the public interest and cannot make any And what's a common carrier? So it's it's essentially a service that is so fundamental, to our way of life that, we rely on it for a key or fundamental, public service. Right? So usually, when we're talking about common carriers, we're talking about, utilities like water or electricity, something along those lines. At this point in time, Internet access has become so fundamental that the FCC considers it to be on on the same sort of level as some of these fundamental utilities that we use, everyday. I bet most people would agree with us. Maybe. That's right. Maybe not most, but a lot. So under title two, these common carriers are required to act in the public interest. And from title two, we get the basis, the legal statutory basis for for net for the consumer protections, that that protect net neutrality. From this switch, from title two to title one, the FCC probably doesn't have the authority to enforce net neutrality principles. You know, this is problematic. This is something that we've actually seen in court before. So this has been challenged in court before. The court as courts have basically said that under title one, the FCC doesn't necessarily have the authority to put in place strong consumer protections, strong net neutrality protections. In fact, it's actually Justice Scalia, who actually found in one of his dissents that this should be a title two classification and not title one. And and more than that, oversight of personal privacy oversight of the personal privacy of users will actually be kicked from the FCC to the FTC under this proposal. And at this point, it's not all clear that FTC actually has the authority to do that. So no one could protect the privacy of Internet users. Is that what it would come down to? It's an open legal question at this point. So the reason why this is somewhat in flux and somewhat in question at this point is that there was a recent ninth ninth circuit decision on the West Coast. This the case is AT and T Mobility versus FTC. And what the court essentially found is that if any corporation, if any component of a corporation has a common carrier element, the FTC cannot regulate it as a con cannot regulate it. Oh, okay. Right? So if you are, you know, if you're an ISP with a common carrier element, it's not all clear that the FTC will be able to step in and regulate
your privacy practices the same way the FCC would under the open Internet order. Okay. So let's talk about, you did a a nice job of highlighting, you know, kind of what this means. What would the kind of tangible benefits to to some different players be? Let's start with, you know, a lot of people are saying that shift to title one would just be a clear win for Internet service providers. They get all the benefits and consumers lose. So what is the benefits to ISPs? Why are they so pro this?
Right. So what this switch essentially does is it allows ISPs demand more money in exchange for preferential treatment. Right? This is the the heart of, I think this this rule making that chairman Pius put forward. So, you know, for one example, the ISPs could deliberately slow down access to websites or services to gouge them for money. Right? And this is something that, you know, we've seen in the past between Netflix and a certain ISP. They could give preferential treatment to its own services, while degrading other services in order to help steer them towards, you know, their own offerings, Right? And and thus drive up their market share in a given product and drive up more ads revenue. And a lot of them are shifting to be content providers as well That's right. Beyond just the pipes as some people would say. Yes. Yeah. The the infamous Ted Stevens. So, you know, and another thing they could actually theoretically do without net neutrality protections is it could actually block websites and web services and either extract them for money or don't extract them for anything at all. We could actually see, the open Internet turn into something more akin to a cable package where you have selected Internet where you have selected access to, you know, say, like, Hulu or Netflix or something like that, but no access to a website like ESPN or CNN.
Okay. Oh my gosh. Don't take away my ESPN. Okay. Actually, I haven't been watching it that much lately, but, MLB something. So why is this bad potentially for general Internet users? It sounds like for ISP's, it's the potential to make more money. I've heard the argument that if they make more more money, they'll invest more in actually building the infrastructure. That seems questionable to me. But what about Internet users? Will there any benefits to them if this changes? Or is that just not the case? So this is actually really interesting in the sense that so there's this practice called zero rating. And, essentially, what this practice entails is,
you use a given Internet service, and, in exchange for using it, the Internet service provider or the mobile mobile broadband provider won't count the data you use through that service or through that website against a a given data cap. And in the short term, this looks like a really good deal. Right? You can use the product as much as you want without having to worry about running up against any sort of of price limitation or data limitation. But in the long term, this actually tends to squash competition. Right? So the idea here is if you're steering all of your all of this traffic for free to a given provider, you're actually making it more difficult for other services, other competing services to compete. You know, so for example, if you see all that service one way, right, you're actually, like, choking off ad revenue and other revenue to these other websites. Right? They actually may be an equal competitive footing or may offer an equal quality service, but are actually being choked off by these ISP practices under this regime. You know, the FCC actually did a study on this, and they actually explained that a third party streaming service would would have to pay, an ISP under their given zero rating plan in the range of something between $4.16 to $47 a month depending on usage to zero rate service. So that way, it doesn't count against the user's data cap. In comparison, their own zero rating plan costs $35 a month period. And it's part of their data free plan, so it actually has no effect on their users on their users data cap. So in effect, it becomes more expensive, for these services to compete than it would, for a consumer to actually just go with a plan, use a service, and nothing else. Wow. Okay. So, obviously,
as this as Chairman Pai's plan started to come out and he announced in his speech, you know, I for lack of a better word, the Internet community, you know, who rose up in the early the Title two battle and, you know, sent more comments than I think any FCC comment period in history. It was in the millions.
I wanna say it was 3,700,000 comments, but you need a couple of comments especially for such a wonky thing. So obviously the Internet community is, you know, probably none none too pleased about this. What's the what's the game plan to to fight back against this proposal and maintain the strong open Internet rules? Right. So I think there's two components to this plan. So the first component is that right now, the FCC has put open this proposed rule making open for public comment. So if you feel strongly about this issue, if the open Internet matters to you, if you care about, the exchange of ideas and future economic development through technology, through the Internet, you should certainly submit a comment to the FCC through their website and to let them know how you feel and why you feel that way. So that's one component of that, and that's that's the that's the first stage of this. The second stage of this is I think this is certainly going to go to court. I think this is going to be challenged by, groups like CET, perhaps by Internet based companies who feel strongly about this particular issue. And the bar here is really, really interesting, because the FCC will have to prove that this rule making was not an arbitrary and capricious change. And, really, the entire basis for this change seems to be just the fact that control of the FCC changed parties from Chairman Wheeler who is a Democrat to Chairman Pai who's a Republican. And if that's the sole basis for this change and given the strong basis of fact that we have supporting the switch to title two, right, a change in party alone seems like the definition of arbitrary and capricious. So to to be quite frank, you know, even if we don't win at the FCC stage, we plan I I think a lot of the people in the civil society community and the advocacy community plan to take this to court and challenge it. So, your job has definitely gotten much much bigger since you've been here. This
we're hoping this has been put to bed. It's definitely not the case. But sounds like you have a plan and probably lots of partners and allies to work with on this one. So thank you so much for your great work, and it is quite the welcome to CDT. Faraz is also writing a series of posts on Chairman's Pies effort to roll back the strong, inter open Internet rules, and you can find those on cdt.org. We just posted the first one already. So check there, and you'll see lots more if this topic is of interest to you as it should be to all Internet users. Thank you so much for us. Thanks, Brian. Sound checks. We are good. So you're rolling. He's so good about doing those sound checks where we're, like, just chatting and he doesn't even know it. Alright. We're recording? Yes. Okay. Every person deserves to be healthy. That's a premise hopefully most of us believe in. I certainly do and the international health team at John Snow Inc is committed to leveraging technology to improve the quality, access, and equity within health systems worldwide. Back in March, just way back in March, I met today's guest at South by Southwest where she was on a panel that focused on technology solutions and international development. Anne Lafond is the director of the John Snow Inc Center for Health Information, Monitoring, and Evaluation. Yes. That is its full name. She joins us today on Tech Talk to share her thoughts on tech and international development and some of the important work she is doing on technology and global health. Welcome, Anne. Thank you very much. I'm so glad we finally made this happen. I know. I know. We tried. We tried. And now it's time. We tried. We tried. We just had to come back to DC to make it work. So first question, not a serious one. How often are you asked about Game of Thrones?
Probably way too often. Our Jon Snow is a little bit different than their Jon Snow. Yeah. Not quite as, sexy? Not quite as sexy at all. He was born in London and and was working in the eighteen sixties, and he's famous for uncovering how cholera was transmitted. He used the technology of the time, which really included mapping and gathering data about where cases of cholera could be found. And he traced the cholera to the water sources and the bad water sources that came from the Thames that were infected by sewage, of course, were the ones that were causing causing cholera. So he worked he worked his way into the neighborhoods, and he removed the pump handle and stopped the water flow and stopped the epidemic. That's so he's done more impressive things than the Game of Thrones. Yes. I mean, I guess he's doing important things and did come back from dead. But,
still, this is pretty amazing. He is our knight in shining armor in public health. Definitely. So tell, our listeners a little bit more about, as you call it, JSI, you know, places that you operate and broadly the type of work that you all do in international development? Sure. So JSI has been around for nearly forty years. It's a public health research and consulting organization.
It works, uniquely both in the international space and domestically. So we have we have offices around The US that are focusing on on American public health issues, but we also have offices around the globe, dealing with public health problems of all sorts, in developing countries.
Great. And what specifically are you doing there? You lead the center with the Center for Health Information Monitoring and Evaluation. Sounds awesome. What are you doing there? Known as CHIME. Oh, yay. That's a good one. That's one of the better acronyms I've heard though, CHIME.
So our center, was created about ten years ago really to pool our resources in a way that helped us bring the idea of of collection of data and use of data to advance public health throughout the organization. It always exists in project to project, but what we wanted to do was to find a way to bring it into a central focus for the organization and to make sure that that all of our our people had the resources they needed, that we were staying up to speed and and dealing with the best, techniques and uses of data that we could. And and that we were also offering that side by side with our implementation work because we often implement projects, but we do that in a data driven way. That's great. That's great. So share a little bit more about, like, specific examples of how you've seen data and technology really influence your work. Well, there's a lot of examples. I think, you know, because the digital technology boom has really, taken off, say, in Africa where, cell phone use is is just growing very, very fast. When I used to work in in Africa, I worked in Sudan and Somalia, we had to drive to someone's office and make an appointment to see them because there was no way to use the landline to even call them. Wow. So now everybody has cell phones all the way down to to some of even the poorest communities. And that has helped us, obviously connect people as as technology does. But it also in public health enables us to push information out to people. It helps us learn more from people, how they experience public health or or give us feedback about their services. And in that way, it creates more transparency and accountability In health information systems, it really has improved quality of data. I think you we you can imagine a system that was completely paper based where people wrote by hand, aggregated and all the way up the system that way. So we've been able to try and circumvent that and create better quality data through that, where systems have been digitized all the way out to the periphery. And I think, you know, from that, you can imagine also that that, there's greater efficiencies and greater effectiveness just by really giving people better access to information and and holding people accountable to the people that they're trying to serve. That's great. That's great. So, certainly, even here in The US, we found that health care is a complicated issue. You've just touched on a bunch of of ways that data's
helping the systems. Are there particular points in health care or health care interventions where data and technology can be most beneficial from your experience?
That's a tough question because it's it's it's affecting all levels of the system. It's obviously giving policymakers better access to the information that they need to monitor the performance of the health system to make sure that they're reaching their millennium development goals or their sustainable development goals and to report back to their people to say this is what we're trying to do to make the health system better. For health workers and program managers, they have better access to understanding what people need and and trying to meet those needs by monitoring the work that they've done and actually looking for gaps and using data to try and fill those gaps. And certainly for the clients or the communities, it's been kind of a mind blowing experience for people because, they not only can can, voice their opinions through their cell phones, they can actually, receive messages, reminders. It's time to immunize your children or remember there's different choices for you if you want to adopt family planning. Here are the three or four different choices. It gives them a lot more access to to information in ways that they've never had it before. One of the most interesting examples is is people actually just, feeding back on their immediate clinic visits. So out of the clinic pops up a little survey that says, did the did the health worker treat you well? Did you get what you wanted? And that feedback can go straight to the health facility or even to the bosses so that if there are quality problems or at least service problems, these things can be addressed much more quickly. Yeah. It seems like a great way to measure impact and effectiveness of your interventions, especially for an organization like yours. Well, I think getting that end user perspective is so key for all technology and getting immediate feedback helps the health workers and the health managers do their jobs better. We're also using technology obviously to do bigger surveys. So if you're doing impact evaluation, you need to to to collect surveys on a or data on a large scale. And we've used, mobile technology in in really creative ways to try and do surveys and to get data up and through the system much faster. That's great. So I have to ask this, you know, CDT does a lot of work in privacy.
Obviously, when you're talking about health data, that's among, you know, the most private information about anyone. That's right. What sort of privacy practices do you all have in place throughout your different programs? Well, for example,
we have to de identify the data. We don't, you know, we we we may take people's names and locations, but when we aggregate it and when we report it, those things are are all left out of the reports. And when the datasets are made available, they're that's protecting people's identity. For example, in in HIV AIDS programs where we're focusing on key populations where, there's, maybe injecting drug users or or gay people that are that the government wants to track for not the right reasons. Right. We're actually having to protect the government from getting data about their people but providing information about their health needs. And, we have
obligation to make sure that those data never get into the hands of people that could use it in the wrong way. That's great to hear that you're doing that and thinking through it. So let's talk about success stories. Do you have any specific ones that you're you're incredibly proud of, things that you've done at JSI that you're like that. It's just incredible.
Well, we had the opportunity to work, on a a Gates Foundation project recently in the last few years, that was called,
CHN on the go. And a CHN is is a community health nurse. It was in Ghana, rural Ghana. And the focus of the
It was in Ghana, rural Ghana, and the focus of the project was was around health worker motivation and job satisfaction. So these women, they're mostly women, are out in the countryside. They're working often on their own, going from village to village, bringing health messages and health care to to rural people and sometimes urban people. And they they they feel quite isolated. And they get their training and they get sent out to the middle of nowhere and then they're expected to perform miracles, really. So we worked with Concern Worldwide, which is an Irish nongovernmental organization, and we helped them do the the research to collect the baseline data. We also worked with a group called ThinkPlace Foundation, who is a human centered design, consulting firm. And they helped us understand how this this job motivation and job satisfaction really manifested itself in these workers. And from those kind of user surveys and and all of that, human centered design activity, we were able to pull together a mobile application that addressed many of the gaps, that health workers were facing in terms of motivation. And they wanted to be, better educated. So they had, learning modules. They wanted to be better connected. So they had opportunities to connect to their supervisors. They did something as simple as creating a closed WhatsApp group that allowed them to actually, you know, send photographs and send messages to their colleagues. So if they saw a child that had a strange rash, they could say, oh, I have no idea what this is. Take a picture, send it off to somebody, and they get four or five different responses. Oh, I've seen this before. Oh, I can help you with this. So it empowered them to be better health workers. And at the same time, they were they were able to connect to each other because they're in an isolated setting, and they were able to to, send pictures and and pray together and all the things that helped make their life a little bit easier both as professionals and as individuals. And this CHN on the go mobile application was a really powerful tool for them. And we were able to do the evaluation both of the effectiveness of the tool and improving motivation, but also the power of human centered design in making that tool really focused on what they actually needed. Oh, that's awesome. That is a great story.
So let's go back to your South by panel a little bit and the topic of that one, and that was, technology solutions for international development. So obviously, you are, you know, at the forefront of this on the health side. What would be some lessons or advice that you'd have for other international developments folks, whether in health or other other sectors or other fields, of how technology could help them do their work?
I think we tend to rely on it and think that it's miraculous. Right? And and, you know, we've tried a lot of things in public health and some work and some don't. So technology is yet another opportunity for us to be innovative, to try new things, but not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. So I guess the the message is there aren't any magic bullets. We We have to look at where technology fits into a certain setting. And that's where the the focus on end users really comes in and understanding end users. We learn something every new something new every time we we see a community or we engage with the community. We think we understand public health problems, but we don't really know them from the angle of that group of people. And having that opportunity to really dive deeply and empathize with them is really important for designing any kind of public health solution, especially around technology where you're really reaching into people's lives and into their kind of psyche. So I would say that that user experience, you know, I know that software designers are like, of course, you would do this. But the software designers we worked with in this Ghana project I talked to you about said the human centered design activities that were done really changed the way that they viewed the people that they were designing for. They could hear the voices of the nurses as they designed the software. I want to be respected. I want my community to to be engaged with me. I want my my coworkers to to to be part of my world. And they really got, a better picture of of what was needed in this software design. Yeah. And I think the last thing I would say is is really creating a kind of bridge between technology solutions and innovations and and the people that that need to use them and the people that need to manage them. It's it's easy to be enamored of technology. And I think that, you will talk to people in ministries of health in in low income settings. And, yes, they they want to digitize fast. They wanna take advantage of this technology because they know it's very powerful. But there's also a need to guide it ethically as we talked about, not to exacerbate inequities that are there. I mean, sometimes, you know, families may have a cell phone and you're trying to aim the the messages at the women, but the women don't have access to the cell phone because the men use the cell phone. So, you know, you really want to make sure you know that setting and that your technology
isn't ignoring cultural norms or or exacerbating any of those inequities? Yeah. No. That is great advice. And I know certainly here at CDT, we we struggle sometimes when you're doing policy advocacy work to remember the human side. Who are you advocating for? Who are they? And it sounds like a lot of the same thinking about who's using it, cultural sensitivities or settings, and really tailoring your technology to that. That's wonderful, wonderful advice. And thank you so much for joining a tech talk. Again, I'm so glad we made this happen. I'm glad I met you at South by. It's been a pleasure and everyone should visit, what's the website?
Jsi.com.
Oh, very easy, very easy. Jsi.com. Thank you so much, Anne. Thank you, Brian. That's it for this episode of Tech Talk. Be sure to check out for us as net neutrality series at cdt.org. And we love getting feedback on the issues we talk about on the so show. So be sure to tweet any comments to to at sendem tech or leave a comment on SoundCloud Google Play or iTunes I'm Brian Wasilowski thanks so much for listening
