 Hello, welcome to the Vergecast for the week of February 10th. I'm Neelay Patel, your host today. You might notice Josh isn't here. Josh is, he's like, look, it's cold outside, he's just never coming back. And actually, there's a big snowstorm in New York today, so it was pretty hard to get people here to the office. So we called in some help from SB Nation, some co-hosts. I have, from SB Nation's Olympic coverage, I have Chip Matthews and Boris here with me today. Hey guys. Hey, Neelay. How's it going? Oh, it's going well. Name's Chip Matthews, that's Chip with a C, Matthews. This is my rusky partner, Boris. Hey. He's okay by me. Yeah, because, so you guys have been in Sochi, you're covering the Olympics for real. Oh yeah, it's awful. Why is it awful? Oh, you got stray dogs running wild. You should see them drink. They can drink down vodka like none other. The dogs? Yeah, the dogs. Boris actually outdrank a whole pack of dogs on the way to the drone ride over here. Yeah, yeah, no, I mean, you guys are there, you've been covering it. I mean, I'm hearing Sochi's just like a crazy hell world. What's your hotel like? Well, it's like an industrial orgy. I don't know what that means. Oh man, you would know when you saw it. There's beams everywhere, there's three toilets to a stall. Oh yeah, no, I've seen the pictures of that. That sounds incredible. I mean, I wouldn't say incredible, I'm incredulous. Oh, well, it's surprisingly beautiful to see three grown men team up in a way that you would never expect in a bathroom. Why would they, if they have three separate toilets, why do they have to team up? Well, you know, all for one, one for all. Okay, yeah, it's Russia, I understand. Win and Rome. So, what would you say the biggest story, I mean, you guys are covering the Olympics every day, you're doing the medal count. What's the biggest story of these Olympics? Well, you know, I've been in broadcasts for quite some time, I absolutely hate it, terrifies me. But they've been trucking in this snow, I have not seen this much powder since the 70s. Yeah. You know. So it's been a good time there, I hear you. It's been a good time? Yeah. He always seems to have fallen asleep. He had one too many nips on the drone ride over here. So big news overnight, we should talk about some tech news. Comcast is buying Time Warner Cable. Haven't heard either of those things. You are a broadcaster, how do you not know about Comcast? The term broadcaster, that's pretty debatable. You got a headset. Yeah, this is just leftover from my Radio Shack days. No, I mean, you're into technology though, what kind of cell phone do you have? Well, I've had the same burner for about 18 years now. You know, the point of a burner is to throw it away. It really just depends who you ask there, do you like? Okay, well, look, actually, John has reminded me that we missed the biggest story of the Olympics here, which I believe truly in my heart is the biggest story. Brian Floyd from SB Nation discovered that Pony by Genuine is the best song for figure skating. I mean, you're a big Genuine fan. Oh, absolutely. I toured with him in the late 90s. Sure, sure you did. So let's just take a look at this. It's Evgeny Plushenko just showing us what Pony is all about. Well, Plushenko really proved himself here. Yes, he can do a quad toe, triple toe, double loop, but he's starting to learn how to work an audience too. Watch this. We're back. Hi, everybody. I'd like to thank Chip and Boris from SB Nation. They're doing the Olympics coverage every day. The SB Nation Olympic medal count is, for better or worse, hosted by Chip Matthews. Boris, there's another one too, Duke Kensington, I think is his name. Oh my God, look, it's Dieter and Addy. Not puppets, or are we? I mean, really debatable. I'd like to thank the SB Nation guys for doing that with us. That's fun. We should have kept it going. We really should have kept it going. I think there's a lot to say about Comcast, I think, if you're a puppet. Yeah. Hey, guys. How does that work? All right. So this is the Vergecast where we discuss technology, technology culture. We're going to bring up Genuine again. I'd like to end the show with Genuine. That's really where my heart lies. But actually, there's a lot going on this week. It's like there was nothing going on, and then last night, everything in the world happened all at once. And so we should just start with it. Just start. Comcast. Comcast. Comcast wants to buy Time Warner Cable for $45 billion. They swooped in. Charter had been picking around the edges. Charter's been trying to buy Time Warner Cable forever. And apparently, Comcast decided, nope, we want to do it. Yeah. I mean, so Charter has been like, they wanted to replace the board of directors of Time Warner. So here's Time Warner and Time Warner Cable. They used to be one company. They split off, and they didn't change the name. So Time Warner Cable has been independent from Time Warner, which is further amounts of split. Yeah. Right. There's a family tree here. It's like it was AOL, Time Warner, and then they split AOL and Time Warner. And then Time and Time Warner Cable split. And then Time Inc. is now splitting from Time Warner, leaving only the media company in the middle, while Time Inc. is going to make magazines. So this conglomerate is just falling apart. And Charter was really interested in basically competing with Comcast by owning Time Warner Cable, becoming a much bigger player in the entire industry. And Comcast is like, nope, we're number one. We're going to buy number two. And in the process, I think telling a number of delightful lies. Addy, you've been- I mean, at this point, nothing a Comcast executive is saying is true. Well, that's the thing, though. I don't know if- so their entire call, I was just on a call, is basically about justifying how this isn't a fa- like this is not a threat for antitrust regulators because they suck. Yeah. That's what you're saying. They're basically like, our service is already so bad. It can't possibly get worse. They start with saying, OK, look, consumers don't have a choice anyways because there is no overlap between these two companies. These are the, they're like the two biggest cable companies that there are and they do not share. There is no point at which you can choose between them because you basically don't have any choice if you are- Yeah. And that's why I think that this is going to end up going through because there's not going to be enough consumer outrage because they already are like, well, I have to pick this one company because it's all that's available. There's a monopoly in my area and I don't really care if the name changes. Well, it's kind of like, I mean, if you have Time Warner Cable, particularly in New York City, you're probably like, man, it can't get worse than this. Right. Yeah. Maybe Comcast will come in and actually know how to run a cable company. Or you're just waiting still and you haven't gotten it installed and- Yeah. Chris Ziegler is moving to New York, moving to New York. I believe he wanted to have- And he can't, I guess the previous tenant of his apartment had not canceled his Time Warner service, so he can't get new Time Warner service. He's like trapped in like some hell world catch 22. Wow. And so in retaliation, he's brought Comcast with him from Chicago to just destroy the city. And the only other thing that they're doing is comparing it. They're saying, okay, look, this market is super vibrant because there's Verizon wireless. Well, there's Verizon wireless. And the other thing that they cited was Google Fiber. Yes. Which is ridiculous. It's a crazy experiment. They're in- They're in two, I mean, they make it up and say we were in a bunch of markets. They're in two cities. Yeah. Right. This is insane. I mean, the Comcast executives are lying, the idea that Google Fiber presents any meaningful competition to Comcast is such a bald faced lie. Yeah. No, that's not true. Google Fiber barely presents a meaningful competition to itself. Like it doesn't exist. It's so nebulous. It's like- I'm pretty sure Time Warner cable has also basically said there's no demand for the thing they're selling. Right. Yeah. No, the Time Warner cable, they've been running up and down. I mean, like, we could provide gigabit Ethernet, nobody wants it. And it's like, yeah, that's because you price it at $400 a month. Yeah, someone asked that question on the call and they said, yeah, no, we offer 50 gigabit Internet. It's just for business customers. They're the ones who want it. Yeah. By the way, we tried and this is a true story. The Verge launched in New York City. We had our first office here in Flatiron. We desperately wanted to get Time Warner Internet. We wanted a fiber line, we wanted fast internet and we couldn't get it. It was so bad. The service that Time Warner could provide us was like DSL service, which is awful for our whole office. We literally had to point a WiMax antenna at the roof of the Empire State Building and have internet beamed to us from roof to roof because Time Warner cable couldn't figure out how to give us fiber in our building. Also it went out whenever there was a problem. It was just like, yeah, it went well, yeah, I mean, it was a WiMax antenna. It was not the best technological decision. It was the only one we could make. But that's where we were at. Like, middle of Manhattan, Time Warner cable was unable to provide adequate service to us. They still call me from time to time and let me know that fiber is now available in that building. It's a little late. Thanks for that. It's nice. I mean, whoever is there now is getting really fast internet, I'm sure. Look, I think this is a disaster for a wide variety of reasons, but there is one tiny little weird silver lining, which is that there has never existed a national broadband provider. Or a national cable provider. Yeah. Well, I mean, there's a lot to unpack there, the cable and broadband bundle. Because they're pitching this as a merger of cable TV companies. But what it, and that's, they keep on telling this lie, another lie, we'll have under 30% of the total cable TV market. But what they will have is over, it's like 34, 35% of the broadband market. Right. Which in my estimation is far more important than the cable TV market. Is that how they actually talk? They're also saying, you know, numbers of customers are dropping. Is that how they're justifying that is cable TV customers? Yeah. Yeah. So they're losing TV customers. But they're, I mean, I don't know anybody, like if you live in America, and you want to be a part of our current modern economy, you need the internet in your house. Yeah. And you need it fast. And the DSL isn't going to cut it. Right. For 90% of the areas. The phone companies aren't competing with you. So you need to get it from your cable company. Right. And your cable company in 19 of the 20 major cities in America is going to be Comcast. Yeah. That is a huge problem. Like, I can't even, that should just scare you straight out. Be like, you don't have a choice. Your choice is a capped wireless broadband from AT&T or Verizon or T-Mobile, but probably not T-Mobile if you live in a number of cities that are smaller, or capped wired broadband from Comcast. Like, that's it. Those are your choices. So the reason that it's scary is you need to know what incentives there are for Comcast to do the things that we want it to do. And the bigger they are and the more markets they're in, the fewer incentives there are for them to increase speeds, lower prices, and not someday, you know, ruin the internet by giving up on open internet rules and net neutrality. Such as by, you know, offering to waive data caps on a major console. Right. Right. So Comcast's long time ago got in trouble by saying, we'll put our live TV app on the Xbox 360, and by the way, if you use it, you won't count towards your data cap. And everyone's like crying foul. And Comcast, their lie, beautiful lie. This doesn't use the internet. This uses a proprietary channel on our network. And it's like, is it really? How many of those do you have? Because I'd love to know more information about your proprietary Xbox video channel. And they just never came out. I will say Comcast has been progressive in like, they've waived most of their data caps. They're not doing that anymore for most of their subscribers. They are thinking of themselves more as a technology company. They are trying to do things like their X1 platform, and they're like X1 in the cloud, and all the stuff that big modern cable companies should do. Well, and they also, you know, you can't give them 100% credit for this because they agreed to them as part of buying NBC. Oh yeah, the other terrifying part of this. Yeah, right. But they also have seven years of following these open internet rules, which is basically like most of the core of the foundation of what we think of as net neutrality. So they're going to do that through 2018, which isn't long enough, but hopefully by then we'll actually have like real laws and regulations to protect that. But yeah, so they'll have 30% of the cable TV market, some larger percent of the broadband market. And they make, they're one of like the big six companies that make all of the media that 90% of people consider. Right, they own NBC Universal. So they make movies, TV shows, they make the news. You know what's going to be really interesting? Watching how NBC News covers this deal. Just flat out, that's weird. That's a weird phenomenon in this world. Two major corporations are going to spend $45 billion trying to buy each other, and they happen to also own like a major media corporation. All that to me is just flat out terrifying. Here's a disclosure, by the way. I'll probably let you know this, Comcast Ventures, with their venture capital arm, is an investor in Vox Media, which owns the purge. Oh, that's right. Yeah. That's cool. I mean, thanks for that, guys. It was really nice of you. Thank you for believing in me. Please don't buy Time Warner Cable. I don't know what else to say to you. Look, the level of, the only way this works is if the government gets seriously involved in what they do. And they say the way that the government got seriously involved with AT&T when AT&T was building a national network, and they say, like, sure, you can have a monopoly on broadband in America, but here are all of the rules you have to follow, and they turn them into AT&T, which I think is not great. I don't think that's a great answer. It's not the early aughts of the 20th century. It's not like 1920. Whenever the rules finally get set out- This isn't Rockefeller in a Washington, DC restaurant with tafts hammering it out. When AT&T's monopoly got blessed, we had just built the railroads. We knew how to regulate a national infrastructure network. We knew what was, we were putting electricity everywhere, and we understood, and the political forces were such that you could do that. We are not in that place anymore. And I think it's very unlikely that if this goes through that we're gonna see the government do the kind of work that it did before to create a national, help AT&T run the national phone network and open access laws. Well, and the thing it did after that was split them up. Which we also couldn't do. Yeah, we split them up, which was fun. And then they reconstituted each other like fucking T-1000. Slowly, yes. It's like I'm so angry I'm not acting angry. No, this is why it's gonna happen, because it's just like you're just gonna be resigned to it. It's just gonna be, you know what, this is terrible, but it's not- But it's not much more terrible than the status quo. Most people, like I'm saying, if you have Time Warner Cable, you're probably happy that someone's gonna ride in on a billion dollar horse and maybe make your service better, because clearly the people running Time Warner... The CEO of Time Warner Cable, he's a Gerald something. He was the guy who didn't know what Airplay was. Remember this? It was a while ago. Oh, that's right, that's right. And it was like, dude, really? You should maybe know what the hell Airplay is, because it is actually how I'm watching most of the Olympics right now, right? Because NBC is doing a terrible job of showing me anything other than figure skating in prime time. I hear there are other Olympic sports. What if they showed you figure skating in prime time, but only just dubbed Pony over it instead of- I would watch that show nonstop. I could probably make that happen in my house. No, I mean, the Olympics, I think, are a prime example. There's a huge appetite to watch them, and you can watch most of them using the awful NBC Live Extra app, but you can't actually Airplay that to a TV properly. You have to mirror. You have to mirror, which is terrible. So it's garbage. I have to sign into my cable provider anyway. Why? What business decision have you made here that makes sense to keep me away from this? Why didn't you make an Apple TV app? Why didn't you make an Xbox app? Comcast? You own NBC. Surely, you know how to make- Anyway, Comcast is the worst. All of the dangers here are super abstract and at least two years away from- I don't think they're abstract at all. I think it comes down to, imagine if your only choice for self-service in America was Verizon. That's where we are. That's what this is. That's where we've been. My only service choice was AT&T for a long time because it was the only place that did service at my house. Yeah. I mean, it depends. If you live in a rural area, your only choice is Verizon, realistically, unless you- I don't think those people- Look, Verizon is adding- This is like the T-Mobile argument. One day, I'm going to write this all down and put it on the internet. It's going to happen. Are you? Yeah. No, look. Here I have the thing that I've been asking for my entire life. A beautiful million- I bought this on a show last week and now I have it and I love it. It's funny how much a color makes me like a phone better. No, this phone is $350. It is competitive with the iPhone in a variety of ways. It is high spec. It's fast. I think it is designed, actually in this color, designed quite well. It has a great screen. All this stuff. 350 bucks unlocked. I bought a T-Mobile SIM card and put it in and I don't have a contract. That's the dream. The reality is that I was coming to work today in a car in New York City and I could not get service for most of the time. I've actually been using unlocked MVNO for a year and a half now. Yeah. A year, a bit more. Through Walmart service, actually, which is ethically horrible, probably. Yeah, probably. There's an AT&T SIM. There's a poor child somewhere frantically spinning a generator to give you cell service. Then anyways, it's actually worked surprisingly well. But you have AT&T. Is it AT&T MVNO? Yes, it's an AT&T MVNO. Yeah, okay. But the network underlying it is AT&T. I'm saying I have the dream from the national carrier and even in New York, it's not great. I get that, but at least there's that level of competition where I can pay less money and get worse service, but I at least have the choice to do that. For wired broadband, which is the backbone of the infrastructure of our economy, the verge doesn't work unless most people have wired broadband. It's not going to happen. The next five years of our growth, we can't make videos and count on everybody to stream them to their phones. We can't make our features if you can't look at them on a desktop computer. We'll get to the tablet stuff and we'll change it, but the biggest and best stuff we make requires you to be at a computer with a wired connection. That's actually the other funny thing about how they're comparing mobile to wired is essentially what they're saying is you do not need to use our service. Your two gigabytes is totally sufficient. It's funny because the wireless carriers, they don't like that comparison at all. If you go and talk to Verizon or AT&T, they're like, you need wires in the ground. AT&T loves to talk about this backhaul, which is if you're a reporter and someone's trying to pitch you a story about backhaul, you're like, please, please stop talking to me. This is never going to be interesting. And they do it. They'll call you up and they'll be like, we've got a great story. We've increased our backhaul capacity throughout Vermont. It's like, this is not a good story. I don't know why you issued a press release, but they do it all the time. Do we have Comcast Internet service in this? Okay, now it's working. Absolutely. They just shut me down. We pay for something very expensive. Yeah. It works 50%. Well, did you see that there's this reported Wi-Fi alliance? Google and Microsoft are going to try and spread out more Wi-Fi. Yeah, they've been trying this forever, right? And they keep on trying new white spaces. Wi-Fi forward. But apparently AT&T and Verizon are not participating. Well, why would they? Well, AT&T for a while was building the Wi-Fi network, but now they don't need it because they want to put people back on LTE. No, I think they still want that as a backup. But they want to run their own. I don't think AT&T wants anybody to use not their Wi-Fi. Right. Just whatever. Also, don't call it Wi-Fi forward, guys. Just don't. Wi-forward. Yeah, isn't it Wi-forward? No, there's the Wi-Fi forward. There's a Fi in there. Oh, God. Yeah. It's awful. Wi-Fi forward. No, I mean Google and Verizon, every major tech company that isn't a networking company has been pushing for more and different kinds of Wi-Fi because they want to break around the logjam of the wireless carriers. And what's amazing to me is we've done a really good job, I think, as journalists covering all of the problems of the wireless broadband industry. The only reason that's true is because there's conflict there in choice. Whatever limited, tiny amount, and there should be more. But no, it gets tiring to be like, you can't do anything about it immediately. You can't switch right away tomorrow to fix the problem, but it sucks. Just constantly saying that day after day after three days. There's no point in covering the wired broadband industry because there's no conflict. There's no choice. So, Ada, you actually were on all these calls today, you've been doing mostly reporting today. I've been on all of them. There were three. No, I was on one, I think. The middle one, right? The one I wanted to be on. The 1 PM one. Is there one after this? I was hanging out with puppets during that time. True story. What's your take? Where are you landing on this? I mean, I just, yeah, it feels hopeless. This is going to go through. It all feels sort of moot and that it's hard to tell that there are threats, but it's kind of hard to even conceptualize them. Okay. So, beautiful dream, hope of the future. Google is not going to roll into every city and spread fiber. Susan Crawford had this editorial in Bloomberg, I think it was, and I've heard her say this before that the trick is mayors. City by city. The city, don't wait for the government to do it, don't wait for big companies to save you. You're mayor, you're an executive at a city, you have the power to just go in and put fiber into your city and that will eventually solve the problem. Well, that's the funny thing though is that they were trying to do this with municipal Wi-Fi maybe four years ago and then they just, the company sued all of them. Well, so look, here's the, let me make the point as clear as I, I was talking about T-Mobile earlier and I forgot to actually say why. If you look at what T-Mobile has done, right? You can criticize their service offering a lot. I have it, I think you can criticize it a lot, but they have taken some customers from AT&T, they've spooked AT&T at least into lowering prices and jiggering their plans. They may have even spooked Verizon today. They spooked Verizon today into changing their prices and lowering their plans. That is the effect of competition, right? Something good is happening for consumers because if you get more people to pay you, you make more money, right? And that's, so they're all fighting for that market share, for that recognition, for consumer support and loyalty, for dollars. If you are Comcast and you're in 19 of 20 major markets and there's zero competition, you have no incentive to improve your offering. Right. Zero. Outside of the mayor of your city or the governor of your state or the president of your country saying buck up and do what I want. And that's where we are at. That's kind of like Crawford's whole point and her, I actually, I did an interview, hopefully we'll be able to pull it up. I interviewed her a while back and she talks about the mayor's thing and she's like, I've given up on the federal government. I've given up trying to get this policy. I think what you're seeing right now happening on the flip side of this with the net neutrality ruling with let's have the FCC kind of like twiddle its thumb and like sing a little song and dance about how they're going to do something, but we don't know what yet to maybe reclassify ISPs as common carriers, like all this stuff, like all this endless lawsuits, wrangling policy debate is going to play out in Washington. And her whole point is, or you can go to the mayor of a town and be like, we're going to spend some money on fiber or we're going to invite Google to our town to put in fiber and scare the other companies. And that's happening. And she, her whole point is you can do this, you can do this at a big level. You can do it at a state infrastructure level. It's Republican mayors are doing it. Democratic mayors are doing it because they know that ultimately this is how you build businesses in your town. Right. Is there a city that is sort of in the middle of this building a municipal like super fast internet connection? There's a few cities. I can't remember Seattle's one. It's the last one I remember. Yeah. Yeah. I mean it's little cities, actually a much little city throughout the south. Yeah. And this is, I think this is like a moment where you see Seattle's plans are on pause. Okay. Well that's great. Every big city, Philly had a big wifi thing a few years ago. They like just got destroyed because Comcast is in Philly. I think Verizon has a deal here that they're supposed to eventually one day put wire. Los Angeles is planning something. Okay. So here's the big counterpoint. More T-Mobile stuff. AT&T tried to buy T-Mobile. Yeah. Hue and cry. I actually, I made the counter narrative that I thought would be interesting was you could say yes to this deal government, but you have to regulate the shit out of them. Yeah. And the government was like, no, we are not reducing competition in this already choked constrained market. I don't, there is a chance that the government will say the same exact, and they, you know, the FCC and the FTC have been making noises about the sprint T-Mobile. It's you know, it's vaguely in the air, which I believe is John Mulder's like ultimate plan is to sell the, it's true. I'm going to write this down and put it on the internet. I swear to God. And they've been, they've been saying like, no, you can't do that. We're not going to approve that. Why would they approve Comcast and Time Warner? Well, no, that's their entire argument though is that it's not a horizontal merger. That's bullshit. That's I think a thing that actually is a- Absolutely bullshit. It's not, it is an actual thing that exists for antitrust. So that's why it's going to go through. It doesn't make it, you know, morally or even- The FCC can only stop it if they can say this is the harm. And I don't think that they're willing to do that. Sure. But there's a level of harm that's beyond consumers there. If you're Disney and you want to sell ESPN to Comcast or you want Comcast to pay you for ESPN, you can't now say, well, Time Warner is paying us that much. Right. Well, fine. Turn it off. No, I'm not saying that the threats aren't real. What I'm saying is- That's a real, I mean, you don't think all of these programming companies are going to show up and say no. Do you really think that the FCC and the Department of Justice are going to be like, eh, no. Yes. I mean, they're doing it to Sprint and T-Mobile right now, right? But Sprint and T-Mobile, you can make a really clear case that they're going to, you know, they're choosing one or the other. That consumers can choose one or the other. That's the entire- But it's not just consumers. It's programmers. It's other internet companies now who, without open internet regulations, like actively politic- Like what you have right now is Comcast promising to not do bad things as opposed to being legally forced to obey the law, right? So my best case scenario is that it goes through and the government's like, if you're going to do this, these are the regulations. This is how it's going to work. This is how much fiber you have to fill. And so this is the tiny silver lining. But you need an activist regulatory interventionist government to do that. I do not- Not going to happen. You know, Tom Wheeler, the chairman of the SEC, you know his job was before all this? Yeah. Cable industry lobbyist. Yeah. Like that's terrifying. Yeah. That guy's going to regulate Comcast. He's going to regulate the biggest company in the game. No, he's going to go to dinner with, what's his name? Phillips? What's the- David King. No. Brian Roberts. The CEO of Comcast. Brian Roberts. He's going to go to dinner with Brian Roberts and hit the links with like every other lobbyist in Washington. And then he's going to go to dinner with Brian Roberts and drink scotch and like count their money. And then he's going to leave the SEC and go back to work for the cable industry. You might be a nice guy, Tom Wheeler. I just don't trust you that you're going to be what Susan Crawford calls a cop on the beat. Yeah. Right? These are the bad things are happening in this neighborhood. Like go fix it. And we're terrible at just identifying that the bad things are real because they constantly, nonstop lying to us, whether the bad things aren't happening or the bad things aren't as bad as I think they are. Yeah. And all you got to do is open your eyes and see like they have an extraordinary amount of market power through the reason that your cable box sucks is Comcast. That's why they can roll out X1. They can do all this other stuff, but the X1 still kind of blows. There's no real competition. It's still kind of huge. They're not delivering television over IP. Apple hasn't made a TV because they can't get deals with all these companies. So that's, that's the possible silver lining. Microsoft can't deliver a real TV solution. If Comcast has a national network, then Apple and Microsoft and Intel will have like, they can, they can hash out a deal with one player and then everybody else is able to fall in line instead of having Comcast and Time Warner and Charter and all the other people play off each other and blow up every TV deal they try to make. Could the silver lining be that like, yes, we have a horrible national monopoly that throttles our speeds and limits our access to free internet. But at least the interface is nicer. But we'll have an Apple TV to go with it. Right? Look, I can see the Comcast sitting in front of Congress and being like, yeah, we'll make some promises. Here's, we're going to open up our TV delivery system to Apple and Microsoft. We've had productive conversations and we look forward to working with partners in the future. This is exactly what Microsoft said when they launched the Xbox One. And John McCain will say, will my apps update automatically? And they'll say yes. Yeah, I'll laugh. Stamp. Proved. And like, sure, you can promise me everything in the world. You can, I'm sure that that is going to come up. Like a hundred percent sure that, you know, when they go and sit down in front of Congress and they ask, why should we let you do this? My service is pretty like, you know, Mr. Roberts, I live here. I live here in New York City and, you know, my Time Warner cable service is pretty awful. And you'll be like, well, we look forward to improving your service. And I just want Apple to sell me a TV. You know, can you work with a company like that? You know, something really innovative? Well, we look forward to working with all our partners in the future. And now that we have this expanded scope, you know, we really look forward to a new wave of innovation built on our innovative X1 platform. And it's like, like, just kill me. Like, I'm already dead. All right? Like, my body's just walking around looking sad every day of my fucking life. Yeah, I'm done. We should move on. Let's talk about, there's two more depressing things to talk about. Oh yeah, I was going to say, this is not getting any better. It's really not getting better. So one of the things, with net neutrality and with the NSA stuff, and now with this, there is a lot of conversation about like, how do we protest this? How do we stop it? How do we get involved? I think that question is really, really unanswered. Addie, there was just an NSA protest. It is still unanswered. It's still unanswered. But this is like, it's hard to do. So let's talk about this. This is the internet trying to stop spying. So very, very short background is that there have been a lot of protests already. One of them was called Stop Watching Us. And they recorded like Maggie Jelenhall and a bunch of whistleblowers and tons of people saying stop watching us, NSA, and had a big general protest last year. Maggie Jelenhall? I believe so. So anyways, this year, some of them split off and they said, okay, look, we have this bill in the Senate now and the House, and we should actually try to get people to pass it. So they decided to model this after the SOPA protests of 2012, thinking, okay, well, this is us stopping a bill. Can't be that hard for us to stop one bill, which is Dianne Feinstein's, and then pass another one. This didn't actually work. Well, it wasn't as extreme as the SOPA stuff, right? I mean, SOPA stuff was the first time sites actually shut down, actually put up black banners. In this case, like Reddit had a little thing in the corner. Like I was looking it up today. It's kind of hard because I don't think people collected definitive numbers on SOPA. But SOPA was some like 75,000 to 100,000 sites. At the beginning of this, they had 6,000. There were maybe like in the millions of calls placed through like Wikipedia, there were 50, no, it's like 70,000 calls placed. It was tiny in scope. I think getting people to say no to something is easier than getting people to affirmatively try to do something. Well, it's also that SOPA was one thing. SOPA wasn't like, oh, by the way, the internet is also copyright. They're going to take your car and say that it's piracy and do a bunch of other things. It's like this is going to do one thing. Yeah, one thing and then- And you can stop it just by stopping this bill. You'll win. And then they'll do something later, whatever. But this is one part of a huge mass of things and those other things are even worse. And if you do this thing plus this other thing, then you've got a pretty good chance of stopping this one tiny thing, but you're still not going to feel good about the rest of it. Yeah, there's no good pay. Like if you get this payoff, you're still going to think the rest of it is terrible if you're the kind of person who's going to join an NSA protest. Right. And to me, the question is, every time I talk to anybody in government about SOPA, they get like this weird like thousand yard stare. They call it the Arab Spring afterwards. Yeah. What? Seriously. I mean, I was reading an old interview and he says, no, this was like the Arab Spring. I'd never seen anything on this scale before. Yeah. And they're terrified of like- They have no perspective. Well, because they could also, I mean, they could really do a giant scorched earth campaign though because they made SOPA, like it was a bad bill. They made it a bill that was going to literally shut down the internet and everyone believed that and their name was like mud. Like everyone hated them. More, maybe even more than they- And it was barely even out of committee, right? Like never even- Yeah. So the SOPA protest to me was always, I mean, I wrote a thing at the time. I was like, you can only do this once. You only get to shut down the internet over something one time. Well, the funny thing though is that the EFF actually made a good point, which is that this was a giant battle because this was built on, was it COICA? Which was another similar bill that got rewritten into PIPA, the Senate version of SOPA. Right. So this was actually a long thing. It was just that COICA, like that all these things sort of got nipped in the bud and that they were one thing. And that they hadn't happened yet. But they're all, A, it's like those things are all coming back in bite-sized pieces now. They've learned how to do it. They've learned how to avoid this. But what they never, what the lesson they should have learned from SOPA and PIPA was there is an enormous constituency of people in the United States who have very deep feelings and thoughts about how the internet should be regulated, not regulated, distributed, billed, serviced, consumed. That is, as far as you can tell, a pretty unified block. And if you can bring them together in a SOPA-like movement, it's a lot of people. And that's overwhelming to our government. Like our government responded to the overwhelming number of people who were like, don't break the internet. That same group of people, you can't, you can get them all to say no to something. Call up and say, I don't want you to do this. How is your name on this bill that's going to kill the internet? It's harder to get them to call and say, I want you to support this bill that will stop the NSA. And I don't really know about the national security implications. I'm sure that you can tell me a lot of things about that. That's actually the funny thing is that, so the New York Times, I haven't been able to, I haven't confirmed this, but they were basically saying most of the calls went to Dianne Feinstein. Dianne Feinstein was the bill that they were trying to stop. So everybody did that. Because she's way out in front, right? Yeah, because it passed committee. The other one hasn't yet. But yeah, so they were trying to stop the bill by calling the person who's not actually going to ever back down. And like, I mean, I'm not sure whether people have changed, directly changed positions. It was really clear after. You just need to, I mean, literally, it's the question is, how do we, how do the people who use the internet who live their lives online, us, most of the people watching and listening to this, how do we talk to our government more effectively? And the answer is, we did it one time with SOPA. Yep. Ultra effective. The government remembers that. So the way that we do it- But if I moved home, you know, like, I don't believe that like, my congresspeople in my home state are like, aware of the internet or care about it in a way that like, is meaningful. Like, right. And that's the way that people need to talk to the government is forget about the internet. You've got to pick up a phone, you got to write a letter. Which was what actually SOPA did really well. And what I think this did well, too, is that we basically found out that you can automate this stuff. That's why that is the big lesson of SOPA, is that you could go to Wikipedia and hit a button and they will call your congressman basically. Right. And like, make sure that your senator gets this message. Like, that's a thing that you learned. Good. Social engineering will change the government. So you don't think the day we fought back worked? It seemed like nobody participated. I mean, people participated and I'm sure it worked to some extent. It's just, I don't think that it probably was fair. It basically just had bad PR and that PR was kind of all that it was. And that hopefully, you know, this gets the USA Freedom Act some more votes in Congress. Like that would be great. Do you think it's going to work? I mean, the USA Freedom Act seems like it has a decent chance. It's hard to say. It's like, you know what we need to do? I'm giving myself more homework that I'm not going to do. I'm such a bad at this. But we need to come up with like a position paper. Be like, here are all the things that need to change. Like stop Comcast from buying Time Warner. Like amend these two things. Let us see this stuff. The Vergecast Manifesto. The Vergecast Manifesto. Yeah. The Patel plan for a better internet. I'm not kidding. I should probably do this. I should probably actually make TC do it. There's a specter hanging over America. And then he would enact it in DayZ. The specter is the Vergecast. Look, the Patel plan for a better internet. I'm going to think about it and feel guilty for not doing it. We're going to use the language from the Communist Manifesto. We're just going to change every other word. All right. Speaking of communism, let's talk about that Lumia. What? It was sitting there for me. Speaking of things that look steam powered and kind of shitty. Yeah, I was going to say things that look like they're going to be a thing. I'm going to use the language from the Communist Manifesto. I'm going to use the language from the Communist Manifesto. I'm going to use the language from the Communist Manifesto. I'm going to use the language from the Communist Manifesto. I'm going to use the language from the Communist Manifesto. I'm going to use the language from the Communist Manifesto. I'm going to use the language from the Communist Manifesto. I'm going to use the language from the Communist Manifesto. 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I'm going to use the language from the Communist Manifesto. I'm going to use the language from the Communist Manifesto. I'm going to use the language from the Communist Manifesto.
 Hello, welcome to the Vergecast for the week of February 10th.
 I'm Neelay Patel, your host today. You might notice Josh isn't here.
 Josh is, he's like, look, it's cold outside, he's just never coming back.
 And actually, there's a big snowstorm in New York today, so it was pretty hard to get people here to the office.
 So we called in some help from SB Nation, some co-hosts.
 I have, from SB Nation's Olympic coverage, I have Chip Matthews and Boris here with me today.
 Hey guys.
 Hey, Neelay.
 How's it going?
 Oh, it's going well. Name's Chip Matthews, that's Chip with a C, Matthews.
 This is my rusky partner, Boris.
 Hey.
 He's okay by me.
 Yeah, because, so you guys have been in Sochi, you're covering the Olympics for real.
 Oh yeah, it's awful.
 Why is it awful?
 Oh, you got stray dogs running wild. You should see them drink.
 They can drink down vodka like none other.
 The dogs?
 Yeah, the dogs.
 Boris actually outdrank a whole pack of dogs on the way to the drone ride over here.
 Yeah, yeah, no, I mean, you guys are there, you've been covering it.
 I mean, I'm hearing Sochi's just like a crazy hell world.
 What's your hotel like?
 Well, it's like an industrial orgy.
 I don't know what that means.
 Oh man, you would know when you saw it.
 There's beams everywhere, there's three toilets to a stall.
 Oh yeah, no, I've seen the pictures of that. That sounds incredible.
 I mean, I wouldn't say incredible, I'm incredulous.
 Oh, well, it's surprisingly beautiful to see three grown men team up in a way that you
 would never expect in a bathroom.
 Why would they, if they have three separate toilets, why do they have to team up?
 Well, you know, all for one, one for all.
 Okay, yeah, it's Russia, I understand.
 Win and Rome.
 So, what would you say the biggest story, I mean, you guys are covering the Olympics
 every day, you're doing the medal count. What's the biggest story of these Olympics?
 Well, you know, I've been in broadcasts for quite some time, I absolutely hate it, terrifies me.
 But they've been trucking in this snow, I have not seen this much powder since the 70s.
 Yeah.
 You know.
 So it's been a good time there, I hear you. It's been a good time?
 Yeah.
 He always seems to have fallen asleep.
 He had one too many nips on the drone ride over here.
 So big news overnight, we should talk about some tech news.
 Comcast is buying Time Warner Cable.
 Haven't heard either of those things.
 You are a broadcaster, how do you not know about Comcast?
 The term broadcaster, that's pretty debatable.
 You got a headset.
 Yeah, this is just leftover from my Radio Shack days.
 No, I mean, you're into technology though, what kind of cell phone do you have?
 Well, I've had the same burner for about 18 years now.
 You know, the point of a burner is to throw it away.
 It really just depends who you ask there, do you like?
 Okay, well, look, actually, John has reminded me that we missed the biggest story of the Olympics here,
 which I believe truly in my heart is the biggest story.
 Brian Floyd from SB Nation discovered that Pony by Genuine is the best song for figure skating.
 I mean, you're a big Genuine fan.
 Oh, absolutely.
 I toured with him in the late 90s.
 Sure, sure you did.
 So let's just take a look at this.
 It's Evgeny Plushenko just showing us what Pony is all about.
 Well, Plushenko really proved himself here.
 Yes, he can do a quad toe, triple toe, double loop,
 but he's starting to learn how to work an audience too.
 Watch this.
 We're back.
 Hi, everybody.
 I'd like to thank Chip and Boris from SB Nation.
 They're doing the Olympics coverage every day.
 The SB Nation Olympic medal count is, for better or worse, hosted by Chip Matthews.
 Boris, there's another one too, Duke Kensington, I think is his name.
 Oh my God, look, it's Dieter and Addy.
 Not puppets, or are we?
 I mean, really debatable.
 I'd like to thank the SB Nation guys for doing that with us.
 That's fun.
 We should have kept it going.
 We really should have kept it going.
 I think there's a lot to say about Comcast, I think, if you're a puppet.
 Yeah.
 Hey, guys.
 How does that work?
 All right.
 So this is the Vergecast where we discuss technology, technology culture.
 We're going to bring up Genuine again.
 I'd like to end the show with Genuine.
 That's really where my heart lies.
 But actually, there's a lot going on this week.
 It's like there was nothing going on, and then last night, everything in the world happened
 all at once.
 And so we should just start with it.
 Just start.
 Comcast.
 Comcast.
 Comcast wants to buy Time Warner Cable for $45 billion.
 They swooped in.
 Charter had been picking around the edges.
 Charter's been trying to buy Time Warner Cable forever.
 And apparently, Comcast decided, nope, we want to do it.
 Yeah.
 I mean, so Charter has been like, they wanted to replace the board of directors of Time
 Warner.
 So here's Time Warner and Time Warner Cable.
 They used to be one company.
 They split off, and they didn't change the name.
 So Time Warner Cable has been independent from Time Warner, which is further amounts
 of split.
 Yeah.
 Right.
 There's a family tree here.
 It's like it was AOL, Time Warner, and then they split AOL and Time Warner.
 And then Time and Time Warner Cable split.
 And then Time Inc. is now splitting from Time Warner, leaving only the media company in
 the middle, while Time Inc. is going to make magazines.
 So this conglomerate is just falling apart.
 And Charter was really interested in basically competing with Comcast by owning Time Warner
 Cable, becoming a much bigger player in the entire industry.
 And Comcast is like, nope, we're number one.
 We're going to buy number two.
 And in the process, I think telling a number of delightful lies.
 Addy, you've been-
 I mean, at this point, nothing a Comcast executive is saying is true.
 Well, that's the thing, though.
 I don't know if- so their entire call, I was just on a call, is basically about justifying
 how this isn't a fa- like this is not a threat for antitrust regulators because they suck.
 Yeah.
 That's what you're saying.
 They're basically like, our service is already so bad.
 It can't possibly get worse.
 They start with saying, OK, look, consumers don't have a choice anyways because there
 is no overlap between these two companies.
 These are the, they're like the two biggest cable companies that there are and they do
 not share.
 There is no point at which you can choose between them because you basically don't have
 any choice if you are-
 Yeah.
 And that's why I think that this is going to end up going through because there's not
 going to be enough consumer outrage because they already are like, well, I have to pick
 this one company because it's all that's available.
 There's a monopoly in my area and I don't really care if the name changes.
 Well, it's kind of like, I mean, if you have Time Warner Cable, particularly in New York
 City, you're probably like, man, it can't get worse than this.
 Right.
 Yeah.
 Maybe Comcast will come in and actually know how to run a cable company.
 Or you're just waiting still and you haven't gotten it installed and-
 Yeah.
 Chris Ziegler is moving to New York, moving to New York.
 I believe he wanted to have-
 And he can't, I guess the previous tenant of his apartment had not canceled his Time
 Warner service, so he can't get new Time Warner service.
 He's like trapped in like some hell world catch 22.
 Wow.
 And so in retaliation, he's brought Comcast with him from Chicago to just destroy the
 city.
 And the only other thing that they're doing is comparing it.
 They're saying, okay, look, this market is super vibrant because there's Verizon wireless.
 Well, there's Verizon wireless.
 And the other thing that they cited was Google Fiber.
 Yes.
 Which is ridiculous.
 It's a crazy experiment.
 They're in-
 They're in two, I mean, they make it up and say we were in a bunch of markets.
 They're in two cities.
 Yeah.
 Right.
 This is insane.
 I mean, the Comcast executives are lying, the idea that Google Fiber presents any meaningful
 competition to Comcast is such a bald faced lie.
 Yeah.
 No, that's not true.
 Google Fiber barely presents a meaningful competition to itself.
 Like it doesn't exist.
 It's so nebulous.
 It's like-
 I'm pretty sure Time Warner cable has also basically said there's no demand for the thing
 they're selling.
 Right.
 Yeah.
 No, the Time Warner cable, they've been running up and down.
 I mean, like, we could provide gigabit Ethernet, nobody wants it.
 And it's like, yeah, that's because you price it at $400 a month.
 Yeah, someone asked that question on the call and they said, yeah, no, we offer 50 gigabit
 Internet.
 It's just for business customers.
 They're the ones who want it.
 Yeah.
 By the way, we tried and this is a true story.
 The Verge launched in New York City.
 We had our first office here in Flatiron.
 We desperately wanted to get Time Warner Internet.
 We wanted a fiber line, we wanted fast internet and we couldn't get it.
 It was so bad.
 The service that Time Warner could provide us was like DSL service, which is awful for
 our whole office.
 We literally had to point a WiMax antenna at the roof of the Empire State Building and
 have internet beamed to us from roof to roof because Time Warner cable couldn't figure
 out how to give us fiber in our building.
 Also it went out whenever there was a problem.
 It was just like, yeah, it went well, yeah, I mean, it was a WiMax antenna.
 It was not the best technological decision.
 It was the only one we could make.
 But that's where we were at.
 Like, middle of Manhattan, Time Warner cable was unable to provide adequate service to
 us.
 They still call me from time to time and let me know that fiber is now available in that
 building.
 It's a little late.
 Thanks for that.
 It's nice.
 I mean, whoever is there now is getting really fast internet, I'm sure.
 Look, I think this is a disaster for a wide variety of reasons, but there is one tiny
 little weird silver lining, which is that there has never existed a national broadband
 provider.
 Or a national cable provider.
 Yeah.
 Well, I mean, there's a lot to unpack there, the cable and broadband bundle.
 Because they're pitching this as a merger of cable TV companies.
 But what it, and that's, they keep on telling this lie, another lie, we'll have under 30%
 of the total cable TV market.
 But what they will have is over, it's like 34, 35% of the broadband market.
 Right.
 Which in my estimation is far more important than the cable TV market.
 Is that how they actually talk?
 They're also saying, you know, numbers of customers are dropping.
 Is that how they're justifying that is cable TV customers?
 Yeah.
 Yeah.
 So they're losing TV customers.
 But they're, I mean, I don't know anybody, like if you live in America, and you want
 to be a part of our current modern economy, you need the internet in your house.
 Yeah.
 And you need it fast.
 And the DSL isn't going to cut it.
 Right.
 For 90% of the areas.
 The phone companies aren't competing with you.
 So you need to get it from your cable company.
 Right.
 And your cable company in 19 of the 20 major cities in America is going to be Comcast.
 Yeah.
 That is a huge problem.
 Like, I can't even, that should just scare you straight out.
 Be like, you don't have a choice.
 Your choice is a capped wireless broadband from AT&T or Verizon or T-Mobile, but probably
 not T-Mobile if you live in a number of cities that are smaller, or capped wired broadband
 from Comcast.
 Like, that's it.
 Those are your choices.
 So the reason that it's scary is you need to know what incentives there are for Comcast
 to do the things that we want it to do.
 And the bigger they are and the more markets they're in, the fewer incentives there are
 for them to increase speeds, lower prices, and not someday, you know, ruin the internet
 by giving up on open internet rules and net neutrality.
 Such as by, you know, offering to waive data caps on a major console.
 Right.
 Right.
 So Comcast's long time ago got in trouble by saying, we'll put our live TV app on the
 Xbox 360, and by the way, if you use it, you won't count towards your data cap.
 And everyone's like crying foul.
 And Comcast, their lie, beautiful lie.
 This doesn't use the internet.
 This uses a proprietary channel on our network.
 And it's like, is it really?
 How many of those do you have?
 Because I'd love to know more information about your proprietary Xbox video channel.
 And they just never came out.
 I will say Comcast has been progressive in like, they've waived most of their data caps.
 They're not doing that anymore for most of their subscribers.
 They are thinking of themselves more as a technology company.
 They are trying to do things like their X1 platform, and they're like X1 in the cloud,
 and all the stuff that big modern cable companies should do.
 Well, and they also, you know, you can't give them 100% credit for this because they agreed
 to them as part of buying NBC.
 Oh yeah, the other terrifying part of this.
 Yeah, right.
 But they also have seven years of following these open internet rules, which is basically
 like most of the core of the foundation of what we think of as net neutrality.
 So they're going to do that through 2018, which isn't long enough, but hopefully by
 then we'll actually have like real laws and regulations to protect that.
 But yeah, so they'll have 30% of the cable TV market, some larger percent of the broadband
 market.
 And they make, they're one of like the big six companies that make all of the media that
 90% of people consider.
 Right, they own NBC Universal.
 So they make movies, TV shows, they make the news.
 You know what's going to be really interesting?
 Watching how NBC News covers this deal.
 Just flat out, that's weird.
 That's a weird phenomenon in this world.
 Two major corporations are going to spend $45 billion trying to buy each other, and
 they happen to also own like a major media corporation.
 All that to me is just flat out terrifying.
 Here's a disclosure, by the way.
 I'll probably let you know this, Comcast Ventures, with their venture capital arm, is an investor
 in Vox Media, which owns the purge.
 Oh, that's right.
 Yeah.
 That's cool.
 I mean, thanks for that, guys.
 It was really nice of you.
 Thank you for believing in me.
 Please don't buy Time Warner Cable.
 I don't know what else to say to you.
 Look, the level of, the only way this works is if the government gets seriously involved
 in what they do.
 And they say the way that the government got seriously involved with AT&T when AT&T was
 building a national network, and they say, like, sure, you can have a monopoly on broadband
 in America, but here are all of the rules you have to follow, and they turn them into
 AT&T, which I think is not great.
 I don't think that's a great answer.
 It's not the early aughts of the 20th century.
 It's not like 1920.
 Whenever the rules finally get set out- This isn't Rockefeller in a Washington, DC
 restaurant with tafts hammering it out.
 When AT&T's monopoly got blessed, we had just built the railroads.
 We knew how to regulate a national infrastructure network.
 We knew what was, we were putting electricity everywhere, and we understood, and the political
 forces were such that you could do that.
 We are not in that place anymore.
 And I think it's very unlikely that if this goes through that we're gonna see the government
 do the kind of work that it did before to create a national, help AT&T run the national
 phone network and open access laws.
 Well, and the thing it did after that was split them up.
 Which we also couldn't do.
 Yeah, we split them up, which was fun.
 And then they reconstituted each other like fucking T-1000.
 Slowly, yes.
 It's like I'm so angry I'm not acting angry.
 No, this is why it's gonna happen, because it's just like you're just gonna be resigned
 to it.
 It's just gonna be, you know what, this is terrible, but it's not-
 But it's not much more terrible than the status quo.
 Most people, like I'm saying, if you have Time Warner Cable, you're probably happy that
 someone's gonna ride in on a billion dollar horse and maybe make your service better,
 because clearly the people running Time Warner...
 The CEO of Time Warner Cable, he's a Gerald something.
 He was the guy who didn't know what Airplay was.
 Remember this?
 It was a while ago.
 Oh, that's right, that's right.
 And it was like, dude, really?
 You should maybe know what the hell Airplay is, because it is actually how I'm watching
 most of the Olympics right now, right?
 Because NBC is doing a terrible job of showing me anything other than figure skating in prime
 time.
 I hear there are other Olympic sports.
 What if they showed you figure skating in prime time, but only just dubbed Pony over
 it instead of-
 I would watch that show nonstop.
 I could probably make that happen in my house.
 No, I mean, the Olympics, I think, are a prime example.
 There's a huge appetite to watch them, and you can watch most of them using the awful
 NBC Live Extra app, but you can't actually Airplay that to a TV properly.
 You have to mirror.
 You have to mirror, which is terrible.
 So it's garbage.
 I have to sign into my cable provider anyway.
 Why?
 What business decision have you made here that makes sense to keep me away from this?
 Why didn't you make an Apple TV app?
 Why didn't you make an Xbox app?
 Comcast?
 You own NBC.
 Surely, you know how to make- Anyway, Comcast is the worst.
 All of the dangers here are super abstract and at least two years away from-
 I don't think they're abstract at all.
 I think it comes down to, imagine if your only choice for self-service in America was
 Verizon.
 That's where we are.
 That's what this is.
 That's where we've been.
 My only service choice was AT&T for a long time because it was the only place that did
 service at my house.
 Yeah.
 I mean, it depends.
 If you live in a rural area, your only choice is Verizon, realistically, unless you-
 I don't think those people- Look, Verizon is adding- This is like the T-Mobile argument.
 One day, I'm going to write this all down and put it on the internet.
 It's going to happen.
 Are you?
 Yeah.
 No, look.
 Here I have the thing that I've been asking for my entire life.
 A beautiful million-
 I bought this on a show last week and now I have it and I love it.
 It's funny how much a color makes me like a phone better.
 No, this phone is $350.
 It is competitive with the iPhone in a variety of ways.
 It is high spec.
 It's fast.
 I think it is designed, actually in this color, designed quite well.
 It has a great screen.
 All this stuff.
 350 bucks unlocked.
 I bought a T-Mobile SIM card and put it in and I don't have a contract.
 That's the dream.
 The reality is that I was coming to work today in a car in New York City and I could not
 get service for most of the time.
 I've actually been using unlocked MVNO for a year and a half now.
 Yeah.
 A year, a bit more.
 Through Walmart service, actually, which is ethically horrible, probably.
 Yeah, probably.
 There's an AT&T SIM.
 There's a poor child somewhere frantically spinning a generator to give you cell service.
 Then anyways, it's actually worked surprisingly well.
 But you have AT&T.
 Is it AT&T MVNO?
 Yes, it's an AT&T MVNO.
 Yeah, okay.
 But the network underlying it is AT&T.
 I'm saying I have the dream from the national carrier and even in New York, it's not great.
 I get that, but at least there's that level of competition where I can pay less money
 and get worse service, but I at least have the choice to do that.
 For wired broadband, which is the backbone of the infrastructure of our economy, the
 verge doesn't work unless most people have wired broadband.
 It's not going to happen.
 The next five years of our growth, we can't make videos and count on everybody to stream
 them to their phones.
 We can't make our features if you can't look at them on a desktop computer.
 We'll get to the tablet stuff and we'll change it, but the biggest and best stuff we make
 requires you to be at a computer with a wired connection.
 That's actually the other funny thing about how they're comparing mobile to wired is essentially
 what they're saying is you do not need to use our service.
 Your two gigabytes is totally sufficient.
 It's funny because the wireless carriers, they don't like that comparison at all.
 If you go and talk to Verizon or AT&T, they're like, you need wires in the ground.
 AT&T loves to talk about this backhaul, which is if you're a reporter and someone's trying
 to pitch you a story about backhaul, you're like, please, please stop talking to me.
 This is never going to be interesting.
 And they do it.
 They'll call you up and they'll be like, we've got a great story.
 We've increased our backhaul capacity throughout Vermont.
 It's like, this is not a good story.
 I don't know why you issued a press release, but they do it all the time.
 Do we have Comcast Internet service in this?
 Okay, now it's working.
 Absolutely.
 They just shut me down.
 We pay for something very expensive.
 Yeah.
 It works 50%.
 Well, did you see that there's this reported Wi-Fi alliance?
 Google and Microsoft are going to try and spread out more Wi-Fi.
 Yeah, they've been trying this forever, right?
 And they keep on trying new white spaces.
 Wi-Fi forward.
 But apparently AT&T and Verizon are not participating.
 Well, why would they?
 Well, AT&T for a while was building the Wi-Fi network, but now they don't need it because
 they want to put people back on LTE.
 No, I think they still want that as a backup.
 But they want to run their own.
 I don't think AT&T wants anybody to use not their Wi-Fi.
 Right.
 Just whatever.
 Also, don't call it Wi-Fi forward, guys.
 Just don't.
 Wi-forward.
 Yeah, isn't it Wi-forward?
 No, there's the Wi-Fi forward.
 There's a Fi in there.
 Oh, God.
 Yeah.
 It's awful.
 Wi-Fi forward.
 No, I mean Google and Verizon, every major tech company that isn't a networking company
 has been pushing for more and different kinds of Wi-Fi because they want to break around
 the logjam of the wireless carriers.
 And what's amazing to me is we've done a really good job, I think, as journalists covering
 all of the problems of the wireless broadband industry.
 The only reason that's true is because there's conflict there in choice.
 Whatever limited, tiny amount, and there should be more.
 But no, it gets tiring to be like, you can't do anything about it immediately.
 You can't switch right away tomorrow to fix the problem, but it sucks.
 Just constantly saying that day after day after three days.
 There's no point in covering the wired broadband industry because there's no conflict.
 There's no choice.
 So, Ada, you actually were on all these calls today, you've been doing mostly reporting
 today.
 I've been on all of them.
 There were three.
 No, I was on one, I think.
 The middle one, right?
 The one I wanted to be on.
 The 1 PM one.
 Is there one after this?
 I was hanging out with puppets during that time.
 True story.
 What's your take?
 Where are you landing on this?
 I mean, I just, yeah, it feels hopeless.
 This is going to go through.
 It all feels sort of moot and that it's hard to tell that there are threats, but it's kind
 of hard to even conceptualize them.
 Okay.
 So, beautiful dream, hope of the future.
 Google is not going to roll into every city and spread fiber.
 Susan Crawford had this editorial in Bloomberg, I think it was, and I've heard her say this
 before that the trick is mayors.
 City by city.
 The city, don't wait for the government to do it, don't wait for big companies to save
 you.
 You're mayor, you're an executive at a city, you have the power to just go in and put fiber
 into your city and that will eventually solve the problem.
 Well, that's the funny thing though is that they were trying to do this with municipal
 Wi-Fi maybe four years ago and then they just, the company sued all of them.
 Well, so look, here's the, let me make the point as clear as I, I was talking about T-Mobile
 earlier and I forgot to actually say why.
 If you look at what T-Mobile has done, right?
 You can criticize their service offering a lot.
 I have it, I think you can criticize it a lot, but they have taken some customers from
 AT&T, they've spooked AT&T at least into lowering prices and jiggering their plans.
 They may have even spooked Verizon today.
 They spooked Verizon today into changing their prices and lowering their plans.
 That is the effect of competition, right?
 Something good is happening for consumers because if you get more people to pay you,
 you make more money, right?
 And that's, so they're all fighting for that market share, for that recognition, for consumer
 support and loyalty, for dollars.
 If you are Comcast and you're in 19 of 20 major markets and there's zero competition,
 you have no incentive to improve your offering.
 Right.
 Zero.
 Outside of the mayor of your city or the governor of your state or the president of your country
 saying buck up and do what I want.
 And that's where we are at.
 That's kind of like Crawford's whole point and her, I actually, I did an interview, hopefully
 we'll be able to pull it up.
 I interviewed her a while back and she talks about the mayor's thing and she's like, I've
 given up on the federal government.
 I've given up trying to get this policy.
 I think what you're seeing right now happening on the flip side of this with the net neutrality
 ruling with let's have the FCC kind of like twiddle its thumb and like sing a little song
 and dance about how they're going to do something, but we don't know what yet to maybe reclassify
 ISPs as common carriers, like all this stuff, like all this endless lawsuits, wrangling
 policy debate is going to play out in Washington.
 And her whole point is, or you can go to the mayor of a town and be like, we're going to
 spend some money on fiber or we're going to invite Google to our town to put in fiber
 and scare the other companies.
 And that's happening.
 And she, her whole point is you can do this, you can do this at a big level.
 You can do it at a state infrastructure level.
 It's Republican mayors are doing it.
 Democratic mayors are doing it because they know that ultimately this is how you build
 businesses in your town.
 Right.
 Is there a city that is sort of in the middle of this building a municipal like super fast
 internet connection?
 There's a few cities.
 I can't remember Seattle's one.
 It's the last one I remember.
 Yeah.
 Yeah.
 I mean it's little cities, actually a much little city throughout the south.
 Yeah.
 And this is, I think this is like a moment where you see Seattle's plans are on pause.
 Okay.
 Well that's great.
 Every big city, Philly had a big wifi thing a few years ago.
 They like just got destroyed because Comcast is in Philly.
 I think Verizon has a deal here that they're supposed to eventually one day put wire.
 Los Angeles is planning something.
 Okay.
 So here's the big counterpoint.
 More T-Mobile stuff.
 AT&T tried to buy T-Mobile.
 Yeah.
 Hue and cry.
 I actually, I made the counter narrative that I thought would be interesting was you
 could say yes to this deal government, but you have to regulate the shit out of them.
 Yeah.
 And the government was like, no, we are not reducing competition in this already choked
 constrained market.
 I don't, there is a chance that the government will say the same exact, and they, you know,
 the FCC and the FTC have been making noises about the sprint T-Mobile.
 It's you know, it's vaguely in the air, which I believe is John Mulder's like ultimate plan
 is to sell the, it's true.
 I'm going to write this down and put it on the internet.
 I swear to God.
 And they've been, they've been saying like, no, you can't do that.
 We're not going to approve that.
 Why would they approve Comcast and Time Warner?
 Well, no, that's their entire argument though is that it's not a horizontal merger.
 That's bullshit.
 That's I think a thing that actually is a-
 Absolutely bullshit.
 It's not, it is an actual thing that exists for antitrust.
 So that's why it's going to go through.
 It doesn't make it, you know, morally or even-
 The FCC can only stop it if they can say this is the harm.
 And I don't think that they're willing to do that.
 Sure.
 But there's a level of harm that's beyond consumers there.
 If you're Disney and you want to sell ESPN to Comcast or you want Comcast to pay you
 for ESPN, you can't now say, well, Time Warner is paying us that much.
 Right.
 Well, fine.
 Turn it off.
 No, I'm not saying that the threats aren't real.
 What I'm saying is-
 That's a real, I mean, you don't think all of these programming companies are going to
 show up and say no.
 Do you really think that the FCC and the Department of Justice are going to be like, eh, no.
 Yes.
 I mean, they're doing it to Sprint and T-Mobile right now, right?
 But Sprint and T-Mobile, you can make a really clear case that they're going to, you know,
 they're choosing one or the other.
 That consumers can choose one or the other.
 That's the entire-
 But it's not just consumers.
 It's programmers.
 It's other internet companies now who, without open internet regulations, like actively politic-
 Like what you have right now is Comcast promising to not do bad things as opposed to being legally
 forced to obey the law, right?
 So my best case scenario is that it goes through and the government's like, if you're going
 to do this, these are the regulations.
 This is how it's going to work.
 This is how much fiber you have to fill.
 And so this is the tiny silver lining.
 But you need an activist regulatory interventionist government to do that.
 I do not-
 Not going to happen.
 You know, Tom Wheeler, the chairman of the SEC, you know his job was before all this?
 Yeah.
 Cable industry lobbyist.
 Yeah.
 Like that's terrifying.
 Yeah.
 That guy's going to regulate Comcast.
 He's going to regulate the biggest company in the game.
 No, he's going to go to dinner with, what's his name?
 Phillips?
 What's the-
 David King.
 No.
 Brian Roberts.
 The CEO of Comcast.
 Brian Roberts.
 He's going to go to dinner with Brian Roberts and hit the links with like every other lobbyist
 in Washington.
 And then he's going to go to dinner with Brian Roberts and drink scotch and like count their
 money.
 And then he's going to leave the SEC and go back to work for the cable industry.
 You might be a nice guy, Tom Wheeler.
 I just don't trust you that you're going to be what Susan Crawford calls a cop on the
 beat.
 Yeah.
 Right?
 These are the bad things are happening in this neighborhood.
 Like go fix it.
 And we're terrible at just identifying that the bad things are real because they constantly,
 nonstop lying to us, whether the bad things aren't happening or the bad things aren't
 as bad as I think they are.
 Yeah.
 And all you got to do is open your eyes and see like they have an extraordinary amount
 of market power through the reason that your cable box sucks is Comcast.
 That's why they can roll out X1.
 They can do all this other stuff, but the X1 still kind of blows.
 There's no real competition.
 It's still kind of huge.
 They're not delivering television over IP.
 Apple hasn't made a TV because they can't get deals with all these companies.
 So that's, that's the possible silver lining.
 Microsoft can't deliver a real TV solution.
 If Comcast has a national network, then Apple and Microsoft and Intel will have like, they
 can, they can hash out a deal with one player and then everybody else is able to fall in
 line instead of having Comcast and Time Warner and Charter and all the other people play
 off each other and blow up every TV deal they try to make.
 Could the silver lining be that like, yes, we have a horrible national monopoly that
 throttles our speeds and limits our access to free internet.
 But at least the interface is nicer.
 But we'll have an Apple TV to go with it.
 Right?
 Look, I can see the Comcast sitting in front of Congress and being like, yeah, we'll make
 some promises.
 Here's, we're going to open up our TV delivery system to Apple and Microsoft.
 We've had productive conversations and we look forward to working with partners in the
 future.
 This is exactly what Microsoft said when they launched the Xbox One.
 And John McCain will say, will my apps update automatically?
 And they'll say yes.
 Yeah, I'll laugh.
 Stamp.
 Proved.
 And like, sure, you can promise me everything in the world.
 You can, I'm sure that that is going to come up.
 Like a hundred percent sure that, you know, when they go and sit down in front of Congress
 and they ask, why should we let you do this?
 My service is pretty like, you know, Mr. Roberts, I live here.
 I live here in New York City and, you know, my Time Warner cable service is pretty awful.
 And you'll be like, well, we look forward to improving your service.
 And I just want Apple to sell me a TV.
 You know, can you work with a company like that?
 You know, something really innovative?
 Well, we look forward to working with all our partners in the future.
 And now that we have this expanded scope, you know, we really look forward to a new
 wave of innovation built on our innovative X1 platform.
 And it's like, like, just kill me.
 Like, I'm already dead.
 All right?
 Like, my body's just walking around looking sad every day of my fucking life.
 Yeah, I'm done.
 We should move on.
 Let's talk about, there's two more depressing things to talk about.
 Oh yeah, I was going to say, this is not getting any better.
 It's really not getting better.
 So one of the things, with net neutrality and with the NSA stuff, and now with this,
 there is a lot of conversation about like, how do we protest this?
 How do we stop it?
 How do we get involved?
 I think that question is really, really unanswered.
 Addie, there was just an NSA protest.
 It is still unanswered.
 It's still unanswered.
 But this is like, it's hard to do.
 So let's talk about this.
 This is the internet trying to stop spying.
 So very, very short background is that there have been a lot of protests already.
 One of them was called Stop Watching Us.
 And they recorded like Maggie Jelenhall and a bunch of whistleblowers and tons of people
 saying stop watching us, NSA, and had a big general protest last year.
 Maggie Jelenhall?
 I believe so.
 So anyways, this year, some of them split off and they said, okay, look, we have this
 bill in the Senate now and the House, and we should actually try to get people to pass
 it.
 So they decided to model this after the SOPA protests of 2012, thinking, okay, well, this
 is us stopping a bill.
 Can't be that hard for us to stop one bill, which is Dianne Feinstein's, and then pass
 another one.
 This didn't actually work.
 Well, it wasn't as extreme as the SOPA stuff, right?
 I mean, SOPA stuff was the first time sites actually shut down, actually put up black
 banners.
 In this case, like Reddit had a little thing in the corner.
 Like I was looking it up today.
 It's kind of hard because I don't think people collected definitive numbers on SOPA.
 But SOPA was some like 75,000 to 100,000 sites.
 At the beginning of this, they had 6,000.
 There were maybe like in the millions of calls placed through like Wikipedia, there were
 50, no, it's like 70,000 calls placed.
 It was tiny in scope.
 I think getting people to say no to something is easier than getting people to affirmatively
 try to do something.
 Well, it's also that SOPA was one thing.
 SOPA wasn't like, oh, by the way, the internet is also copyright.
 They're going to take your car and say that it's piracy and do a bunch of other things.
 It's like this is going to do one thing.
 Yeah, one thing and then-
 And you can stop it just by stopping this bill.
 You'll win.
 And then they'll do something later, whatever.
 But this is one part of a huge mass of things and those other things are even worse.
 And if you do this thing plus this other thing, then you've got a pretty good chance of stopping
 this one tiny thing, but you're still not going to feel good about the rest of it.
 Yeah, there's no good pay.
 Like if you get this payoff, you're still going to think the rest of it is terrible
 if you're the kind of person who's going to join an NSA protest.
 Right.
 And to me, the question is, every time I talk to anybody in government about SOPA, they
 get like this weird like thousand yard stare.
 They call it the Arab Spring afterwards.
 Yeah.
 What?
 Seriously.
 I mean, I was reading an old interview and he says, no, this was like the Arab Spring.
 I'd never seen anything on this scale before.
 Yeah.
 And they're terrified of like-
 They have no perspective.
 Well, because they could also, I mean, they could really do a giant scorched earth campaign
 though because they made SOPA, like it was a bad bill.
 They made it a bill that was going to literally shut down the internet and everyone believed
 that and their name was like mud.
 Like everyone hated them.
 More, maybe even more than they-
 And it was barely even out of committee, right?
 Like never even-
 Yeah.
 So the SOPA protest to me was always, I mean, I wrote a thing at the time.
 I was like, you can only do this once.
 You only get to shut down the internet over something one time.
 Well, the funny thing though is that the EFF actually made a good point, which is that
 this was a giant battle because this was built on, was it COICA?
 Which was another similar bill that got rewritten into PIPA, the Senate version of SOPA.
 Right.
 So this was actually a long thing.
 It was just that COICA, like that all these things sort of got nipped in the bud and that
 they were one thing.
 And that they hadn't happened yet.
 But they're all, A, it's like those things are all coming back in bite-sized pieces now.
 They've learned how to do it.
 They've learned how to avoid this.
 But what they never, what the lesson they should have learned from SOPA and PIPA was
 there is an enormous constituency of people in the United States who have very deep feelings
 and thoughts about how the internet should be regulated, not regulated, distributed,
 billed, serviced, consumed.
 That is, as far as you can tell, a pretty unified block.
 And if you can bring them together in a SOPA-like movement, it's a lot of people.
 And that's overwhelming to our government.
 Like our government responded to the overwhelming number of people who were like, don't break
 the internet.
 That same group of people, you can't, you can get them all to say no to something.
 Call up and say, I don't want you to do this.
 How is your name on this bill that's going to kill the internet?
 It's harder to get them to call and say, I want you to support this bill that will stop
 the NSA.
 And I don't really know about the national security implications.
 I'm sure that you can tell me a lot of things about that.
 That's actually the funny thing is that, so the New York Times, I haven't been able to,
 I haven't confirmed this, but they were basically saying most of the calls went to Dianne Feinstein.
 Dianne Feinstein was the bill that they were trying to stop.
 So everybody did that.
 Because she's way out in front, right?
 Yeah, because it passed committee.
 The other one hasn't yet.
 But yeah, so they were trying to stop the bill by calling the person who's not actually
 going to ever back down.
 And like, I mean, I'm not sure whether people have changed, directly changed positions.
 It was really clear after.
 You just need to, I mean, literally, it's the question is, how do we, how do the people
 who use the internet who live their lives online, us, most of the people watching and
 listening to this, how do we talk to our government more effectively?
 And the answer is, we did it one time with SOPA.
 Yep.
 Ultra effective.
 The government remembers that.
 So the way that we do it-
 But if I moved home, you know, like, I don't believe that like, my congresspeople in my
 home state are like, aware of the internet or care about it in a way that like, is meaningful.
 Like, right.
 And that's the way that people need to talk to the government is forget about the internet.
 You've got to pick up a phone, you got to write a letter.
 Which was what actually SOPA did really well.
 And what I think this did well, too, is that we basically found out that you can automate
 this stuff.
 That's why that is the big lesson of SOPA, is that you could go to Wikipedia and hit
 a button and they will call your congressman basically.
 Right.
 And like, make sure that your senator gets this message.
 Like, that's a thing that you learned.
 Good.
 Social engineering will change the government.
 So you don't think the day we fought back worked?
 It seemed like nobody participated.
 I mean, people participated and I'm sure it worked to some extent.
 It's just, I don't think that it probably was fair.
 It basically just had bad PR and that PR was kind of all that it was.
 And that hopefully, you know, this gets the USA Freedom Act some more votes in Congress.
 Like that would be great.
 Do you think it's going to work?
 I mean, the USA Freedom Act seems like it has a decent chance.
 It's hard to say.
 It's like, you know what we need to do?
 I'm giving myself more homework that I'm not going to do.
 I'm such a bad at this.
 But we need to come up with like a position paper.
 Be like, here are all the things that need to change.
 Like stop Comcast from buying Time Warner.
 Like amend these two things.
 Let us see this stuff.
 The Vergecast Manifesto.
 The Vergecast Manifesto.
 Yeah.
 The Patel plan for a better internet.
 I'm not kidding.
 I should probably do this.
 I should probably actually make TC do it.
 There's a specter hanging over America.
 And then he would enact it in DayZ.
 The specter is the Vergecast.
 Look, the Patel plan for a better internet.
 I'm going to think about it and feel guilty for not doing it.
 We're going to use the language from the Communist Manifesto.
 We're just going to change every other word.
 All right.
 Speaking of communism, let's talk about that Lumia.
 What?
 It was sitting there for me.
 Speaking of things that look steam powered and kind of shitty.
 Yeah, I was going to say things that look like they're going to be a thing.
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