 We're here. We're in Washington, D.C. The Capitol Building. A building full of hundreds of people who have literally no idea how the Internet works. But there are a couple people who get it. Senator Al Franken is one of them. He let us into his office to hang out and talk about the future of the Internet. So, Senator Franken, thank you for joining us today. It's kind of an honor to be here. My pleasure. What do you call this? It's not airwaves. Not airwaves. Our pipes, our tubes. Your tubes. Our tubes. Well, that's what the Internet is. A series of tubes. A series of tubes, yeah. You have an interesting story, first of all. I think that people kind of, they know an old Al Franken and now there's a modern reborn Al Franken. A beautiful political butterfly. How did you go from one to the other? Oh, it's really odd. It made perfect sense to me. A lot of the comedy I did starting in high school was satire, political satire. And on SNL wrote a lot of the, did a lot of the stupid, silly comedy, comedy, comedy stuff. But always was very, very interested in politics. So one thing I think is really interesting about your political trajectory the past few years is that you've been very focused on technology. You're obviously very focused on privacy. You lead the subcommittee on privacy and technology and the law. Why have you chosen to kind of like lead in that area as opposed to all the myriad other things you can choose in the Senate? Well, it's just an interesting area. I mean, we have, I'm on the Judiciary Committee, which I didn't ask for. I mean, I thought, you know, 90 of these people are lawyers. Why should I be on that? It's probably for the best, actually. Yeah, it actually was for the best. And I've actually been interested in constitutional issues for a long time. But I also came from out of the communications industry, you know, telecommunications industry. So what was kind of interesting is when Comcast NBC came up, I was sort of felt like the one who understood it the most on the antitrust subcommittee. So I felt like this was an area that I kind of understood better than most of my colleagues on Judiciary. So I thought I'd jump in. And we kind of invented it. I mean, we, you know, the subcommittee on privacy, technology and the law. And also, just constitutionally, Goodwin Liu, who was turned down, he was this brilliant law professor who was turned down because he was so brilliant and Asian American. They didn't want him. They didn't confirm him. Well, yes, Republicans didn't want him confirmed because he was so brilliant and young that they knew, well, okay, he'll be on the Supreme Court someday if we don't stop him now. And so they did. But he was, you know, criticized by the Republicans for believing in a living constitution. And he kind of said, well, a living constitution, of course the constitution is living because not everything that existed, that has existed existed then. For example, and they used the telephone. The founding fathers did not anticipate the telephone. And at a certain point, the Supreme Court had to decide what were people's expectations of privacy with the, is wiretapping a telephone a violation of the Fourth Amendment? And they decided it was. So you need a warrant to tap someone's phone. And in the same way, just every technology has to be sort of seen through that lens. Right. Well, so the lens of both, it enables all this, you know, inner communication, enables new innovation, but then it also enables the government to spy on you or the lens of there's Well, it's not the government spying on you necessarily. Very often now, this is actually, it's corporations are able to get all this information. So it's actually a little different than what most people thought of privacy law. Most people always thought of privacy law as the government, you know, finding out what you're reading or the government finding out. Big brother. Big brother. This is now corporate. So brother and people don't, I think people have a fundamental right to privacy and they have a fundamental right to know what at least what's being taken and being stored and control over it when it goes to third parties and they don't. So you've proposed, you mean you've held a few hearings on it. You did the location tracking one a few months ago. You just held a hearing on facial recognition technology and how they're being used. And what I thought it was interesting about that is you had Facebook's head of privacy in there and then you had the FBI in there. Do their interests align? Can you regulate both of them with the same kind of law or do you have to split them apart? Boy, that's a really good question. I think we're going to have to split them apart. And I think it might be easier to regulate the FBI. Frankly, it's just that, I mean, Facebook literally has, I guess what, 900 million. Yeah. They're popular. It's popular. And that means in this regard, they have these face prints of maybe one out of every seven people on earth or something. I think people are more comfortable making rules to contain government than they are to private enterprise or corporations or private entities. So I think that actually leads me into a whole set of issues around net neutrality, right? Because you were a very firm supporter of net neutrality. I have always been, yeah. Yeah. I mean, at that moment, you were a particular vocal supporter when the FCC was debating it. Well, when the FCC was debating it and then when the House tried to overturn it. I was very disappointed that day. Our readers know that I do a lot of swearing when we talk about net neutrality because I passionately believe it's important. Well, according to a lot of House members, the internet did just fine without net neutrality, which was just hilarious. That's my favorite thing. I saw, I mean, House members would get on the floor and go like, you've seen all this expansion of the internet without net neutrality. Why have it now? Yeah. What's your answer? You... I would calmly say, that's we don't want to change anything. That's the architecture. Net neutrality is the architecture of the internet and has been the architecture of the internet and we want to preserve that. That's my answer. That would be my calm answer. Well, I mostly do a lot of fist pounding. Have you heard, for example, there's rumors that the iPhone has FaceTime video calling and they're going to enable it over the carriers, right? They're going to enable it so you can do it over AT&T and Verizon's mobile networks. There's rumors that AT&T is going to charge you for it as an additional feature, but it's just the same data view. Yes, that's wrong. That's, so that's in your opinion, just completely wrong. Yeah. Is there any room? I mean, I agree with you. I'm asking, is there any room? I think that you have a thing called network management, is that what we call it? You have a right to do that and if you're overloading and crashing because people are using something that is making that happen, you have a right to say you can't do that and we're going to have to charge you for that to incentivize not using it or to de-incentivize. Right. But so- Disincentive. Disincentive. We're going to punish you. AT&T should slap you on the wrist and say you- Well, for doing something that would make our network crash if everybody did it. I could see that. That's network management. That I can understand that, but that's not what this is. This is like tiers of services. Yes, and that is not, that's wrong. Because that's not the architecture we've had and to me, that protects innovation. That freedom has been what has created the innovation. It's net neutrality. So you and I are having like, even at this level, which is like pretty high level, let's talk about the basic concepts, a pretty nerdy conversation, right, about net neutrality and the architecture of the internet. Not as nerdy as I imagine most of your viewers have all the time. I will nerd you out. I will freeze you out. It doesn't take much to nerd me out. So I think that's really important. Don't be too impressed with my chairmanship. I'm convinced that you can nerd me out. Well, so, isn't that the problem? We're trying to explain this concept that my readers kind of instinctively get. Even at the level we're talking about it, you seem to understand, you're staunchly supportive of. But one level out of it, you've got an entire Congress of people who don't seem to understand what's going on and they don't have any technical expertise. Yeah. I mean, you have to sort through everything that's going on in Congress. Sometimes people, there's people who do understand things but pretend not to. There are people who- That was a very knowing, like, scenario. There is self-delusion. There is not wanting to know. I mean, there's all kinds of levels here. There's voting with your leadership, etc. There are corporate interests that tend to... I don't know if you've heard of this thing called Citizens United. Anyway, so- So you don't think a corporation is a person? I don't. Shocking information. I don't. Corporations can live a lot longer, or shorter, I suppose. But no, they're not close to people. You can't break a corporation's heart. It's really disappointing, actually. I try every day. I should read some of my editorials about AT&T. We've been talking about this balance between the public interest, the private interest. You've been talking about corporate interests. One of the things that our readers always talk about when they talk about corporate interests, of course. Don't worry about it. You have to vote. Don't worry about it. It's coming right through our mics. Yeah, that's okay, people. That's one of the parts of the sound that's real. It's real. You'd pay for that. You'd have that sound effect to make it seem like you're at the Senate. Okay. So one of the things our readers always talk about when they worry about corporate interests and with the internet is SOPA and PIPA. You are a co-sponsor of PIPA. Protect IP, sure. What the hell happened there, man? Well, again, no bigger champion than an open internet. I also care about intellectual property rights. Did the corporate interests win? Is that what happened there? No, actually. Because the internet guys were screaming from get-go, right? Don't do this. And it went through the Senate, and it was only in the House that there was real traction when Google and Wikipedia blacked out. So what happened in the Senate? No, it didn't get... It got traction, believe me, when PIPA and Wikipedia did. It got traction in the Senate, too. And we heard those concerns, and very legitimate concerns. My concerns were both the openness of the internet, and they're also about... I had someone in my office from a shoe company in Minnesota. It's a very well-known shoe company, and they get ripped off all the time. So what we were trying to target was overseas, other country, rogue websites that pirate intellectual property. Again, the concerns of folks that are, I'm sure, watching today were heard loud and clear. And people are pirating fake pharmaceuticals that are dangerous. They're pirating a lot of stuff that people's jobs depend on. And so it's trying to find the right spot there. But for now, I don't see us revisiting that any time soon. You think it's dead for a while? It's certainly dead for now. And we will have to figure out how to... Because I think probably most of your viewers believe that people have a right to their intellectual property. In other words, have a right to... Our founders were... Many of them were authors and inventors. And so they believed in... We wouldn't have a 747 these days if we wouldn't have a lot of this stuff if you couldn't patent things, for example. And so that has to be... You have to find a way to protect that, and at the same time protect everyone's rights to have an open internet. So what I'm hearing is there's a balance between, in that case, a balance between media rights, intellectual property rights, and what's happening on the internet now, the rights of almost consumers to do stuff with the media as they wish. But how do you balance at a legislative level a place that has historically been pretty unregulated in terms of behavior and also enable so many new kinds of behavior that you might block with additional regulation? How do you balance making sure that... I guess it was how narrowly what behavior we're talking about. And if the behavior is what we're... I think we were trying to achieve, and it was trying to stop foreign websites from pirating clothes and pharmaceuticals and software and movies and all those kind of things. So that's the kind of behavior which is an illegal behavior, and in this country is illegal, and this was an attempt to get at the foreign... But can you do that with a technical solution of like let's monkey with DNS, or can you do that with another way? Because a technical solution is to bomb at people, right? Yeah, but the problem is that you had no legal solution because they're foreign entities, and we don't know where they are. I think a technical solution is probably... I actually do have to run. Senator Franken, it was really nice. Thanks for talking to us today.
 We're here. We're in Washington, D.C. The Capitol Building. A building full of hundreds of people
 who have literally no idea how the Internet works. But there are a couple people who get
 it. Senator Al Franken is one of them. He let us into his office to hang out and talk
 about the future of the Internet. So, Senator Franken, thank you for joining us today. It's
 kind of an honor to be here. My pleasure. What do you call this? It's not airwaves.
 Not airwaves. Our pipes, our tubes. Your tubes. Our tubes. Well, that's what the Internet
 is. A series of tubes. A series of tubes, yeah. You have an interesting story, first
 of all. I think that people kind of, they know an old Al Franken and now there's a modern
 reborn Al Franken. A beautiful political butterfly. How did you go from one to the
 other? Oh, it's really odd. It made perfect sense to me. A lot of the comedy I did starting
 in high school was satire, political satire. And on SNL wrote a lot of the, did a lot of
 the stupid, silly comedy, comedy, comedy stuff. But always was very, very interested in politics.
 So one thing I think is really interesting about your political trajectory the past few
 years is that you've been very focused on technology. You're obviously very focused
 on privacy. You lead the subcommittee on privacy and technology and the law. Why have you chosen
 to kind of like lead in that area as opposed to all the myriad other things you can choose
 in the Senate? Well, it's just an interesting area. I mean, we have, I'm on the Judiciary
 Committee, which I didn't ask for. I mean, I thought, you know, 90 of these people are
 lawyers. Why should I be on that? It's probably for the best, actually. Yeah, it actually
 was for the best. And I've actually been interested in constitutional issues for a long time.
 But I also came from out of the communications industry, you know, telecommunications industry.
 So what was kind of interesting is when Comcast NBC came up, I was sort of felt like the one
 who understood it the most on the antitrust subcommittee. So I felt like this was an area
 that I kind of understood better than most of my colleagues on Judiciary. So I thought
 I'd jump in. And we kind of invented it. I mean, we, you know, the subcommittee on privacy,
 technology and the law. And also, just constitutionally, Goodwin Liu, who was turned down, he was this
 brilliant law professor who was turned down because he was so brilliant and Asian American.
 They didn't want him. They didn't confirm him. Well, yes, Republicans didn't want him
 confirmed because he was so brilliant and young that they knew, well, okay, he'll be
 on the Supreme Court someday if we don't stop him now. And so they did. But he was, you
 know, criticized by the Republicans for believing in a living constitution. And he kind of said,
 well, a living constitution, of course the constitution is living because not everything
 that existed, that has existed existed then. For example, and they used the telephone.
 The founding fathers did not anticipate the telephone. And at a certain point, the Supreme
 Court had to decide what were people's expectations of privacy with the, is wiretapping a telephone
 a violation of the Fourth Amendment? And they decided it was. So you need a warrant to tap
 someone's phone. And in the same way, just every technology has to be sort of seen through
 that lens.
 Right. Well, so the lens of both, it enables all this, you know, inner communication, enables
 new innovation, but then it also enables the government to spy on you or the lens of there's
 Well, it's not the government spying on you necessarily. Very often now, this is actually,
 it's corporations are able to get all this information. So it's actually a little different
 than what most people thought of privacy law. Most people always thought of privacy law
 as the government, you know, finding out what you're reading or the government finding out.
 Big brother.
 Big brother. This is now corporate. So brother and people don't, I think people have a fundamental
 right to privacy and they have a fundamental right to know what at least what's being taken
 and being stored and control over it when it goes to third parties and they don't.
 So you've proposed, you mean you've held a few hearings on it. You did the location tracking
 one a few months ago. You just held a hearing on facial recognition technology and how they're
 being used. And what I thought it was interesting about that is you had Facebook's head of privacy
 in there and then you had the FBI in there. Do their interests align? Can you regulate
 both of them with the same kind of law or do you have to split them apart?
 Boy, that's a really good question. I think we're going to have to split them apart. And
 I think it might be easier to regulate the FBI. Frankly, it's just that, I mean, Facebook
 literally has, I guess what, 900 million.
 Yeah. They're popular.
 It's popular. And that means in this regard, they have these face prints of maybe one out
 of every seven people on earth or something. I think people are more comfortable making
 rules to contain government than they are to private enterprise or corporations or private
 entities.
 So I think that actually leads me into a whole set of issues around net neutrality, right?
 Because you were a very firm supporter of net neutrality.
 I have always been, yeah.
 Yeah. I mean, at that moment, you were a particular vocal supporter when the FCC was debating
 it.
 Well, when the FCC was debating it and then when the House tried to overturn it.
 I was very disappointed that day. Our readers know that I do a lot of swearing when we talk
 about net neutrality because I passionately believe it's important.
 Well, according to a lot of House members, the internet did just fine without net neutrality,
 which was just hilarious. That's my favorite thing. I saw, I mean, House members would
 get on the floor and go like, you've seen all this expansion of the internet without
 net neutrality. Why have it now?
 Yeah. What's your answer?
 You... I would calmly say, that's we don't want to change anything. That's the architecture.
 Net neutrality is the architecture of the internet and has been the architecture of
 the internet and we want to preserve that. That's my answer. That would be my calm answer.
 Well, I mostly do a lot of fist pounding. Have you heard, for example, there's rumors
 that the iPhone has FaceTime video calling and they're going to enable it over the carriers,
 right? They're going to enable it so you can do it over AT&T and Verizon's mobile networks.
 There's rumors that AT&T is going to charge you for it as an additional feature, but it's
 just the same data view.
 Yes, that's wrong.
 That's, so that's in your opinion, just completely wrong.
 Yeah.
 Is there any room? I mean, I agree with you. I'm asking, is there any room?
 I think that you have a thing called network management, is that what we call it? You have
 a right to do that and if you're overloading and crashing because people are using something
 that is making that happen, you have a right to say you can't do that and we're going to
 have to charge you for that to incentivize not using it or to de-incentivize.
 Right. But so-
 Disincentive.
 Disincentive. We're going to punish you. AT&T should slap you on the wrist and say you-
 Well, for doing something that would make our network crash if everybody did it. I could
 see that. That's network management. That I can understand that, but that's not what
 this is.
 This is like tiers of services.
 Yes, and that is not, that's wrong. Because that's not the architecture we've had and
 to me, that protects innovation. That freedom has been what has created the innovation.
 It's net neutrality.
 So you and I are having like, even at this level, which is like pretty high level, let's
 talk about the basic concepts, a pretty nerdy conversation, right, about net neutrality
 and the architecture of the internet.
 Not as nerdy as I imagine most of your viewers have all the time.
 I will nerd you out. I will freeze you out.
 It doesn't take much to nerd me out.
 So I think that's really important.
 Don't be too impressed with my chairmanship. I'm convinced that you can nerd me out.
 Well, so, isn't that the problem? We're trying to explain this concept that my readers kind
 of instinctively get. Even at the level we're talking about it, you seem to understand,
 you're staunchly supportive of. But one level out of it, you've got an entire Congress of
 people who don't seem to understand what's going on and they don't have any technical
 expertise.
 Yeah. I mean, you have to sort through everything that's going on in Congress. Sometimes people,
 there's people who do understand things but pretend not to. There are people who-
 That was a very knowing, like, scenario.
 There is self-delusion. There is not wanting to know. I mean, there's all kinds of levels
 here. There's voting with your leadership, etc. There are corporate interests that tend
 to... I don't know if you've heard of this thing called Citizens United. Anyway, so-
 So you don't think a corporation is a person?
 I don't.
 Shocking information.
 I don't. Corporations can live a lot longer, or shorter, I suppose. But no, they're not
 close to people. You can't break a corporation's heart.
 It's really disappointing, actually. I try every day. I should read some of my editorials
 about AT&T. We've been talking about this balance between the public interest, the private
 interest. You've been talking about corporate interests. One of the things that our readers
 always talk about when they talk about corporate interests, of course.
 Don't worry about it.
 You have to vote.
 Don't worry about it.
 It's coming right through our mics.
 Yeah, that's okay, people. That's one of the parts of the sound that's real. It's real.
 You'd pay for that. You'd have that sound effect to make it seem like you're at the
 Senate. Okay.
 So one of the things our readers always talk about when they worry about corporate interests
 and with the internet is SOPA and PIPA.
 You are a co-sponsor of PIPA.
 Protect IP, sure.
 What the hell happened there, man?
 Well, again, no bigger champion than an open internet. I also care about intellectual property
 rights.
 Did the corporate interests win? Is that what happened there?
 No, actually.
 Because the internet guys were screaming from get-go, right? Don't do this. And it went
 through the Senate, and it was only in the House that there was real traction when Google
 and Wikipedia blacked out. So what happened in the Senate?
 No, it didn't get... It got traction, believe me, when PIPA and Wikipedia did. It got traction
 in the Senate, too. And we heard those concerns, and very legitimate concerns. My concerns
 were both the openness of the internet, and they're also about... I had someone in my
 office from a shoe company in Minnesota. It's a very well-known shoe company, and they get
 ripped off all the time.
 So what we were trying to target was overseas, other country, rogue websites that pirate
 intellectual property. Again, the concerns of folks that are, I'm sure, watching today
 were heard loud and clear. And people are pirating fake pharmaceuticals that are dangerous.
 They're pirating a lot of stuff that people's jobs depend on. And so it's trying to find
 the right spot there. But for now, I don't see us revisiting that any time soon.
 You think it's dead for a while?
 It's certainly dead for now. And we will have to figure out how to... Because I think probably
 most of your viewers believe that people have a right to their intellectual property. In
 other words, have a right to... Our founders were... Many of them were authors and inventors.
 And so they believed in... We wouldn't have a 747 these days if we wouldn't have a lot
 of this stuff if you couldn't patent things, for example. And so that has to be... You
 have to find a way to protect that, and at the same time protect everyone's rights to
 have an open internet.
 So what I'm hearing is there's a balance between, in that case, a balance between media rights,
 intellectual property rights, and what's happening on the internet now, the rights of almost
 consumers to do stuff with the media as they wish. But how do you balance at a legislative
 level a place that has historically been pretty unregulated in terms of behavior and also
 enable so many new kinds of behavior that you might block with additional regulation?
 How do you balance making sure that...
 I guess it was how narrowly what behavior we're talking about. And if the behavior is
 what we're... I think we were trying to achieve, and it was trying to stop foreign websites
 from pirating clothes and pharmaceuticals and software and movies and all those kind
 of things. So that's the kind of behavior which is an illegal behavior, and in this
 country is illegal, and this was an attempt to get at the foreign...
 But can you do that with a technical solution of like let's monkey with DNS, or can you
 do that with another way? Because a technical solution is to bomb at people, right?
 Yeah, but the problem is that you had no legal solution because they're foreign entities,
 and we don't know where they are.
 I think a technical solution is probably...
 I actually do have to run.
 Senator Franken, it was really nice. Thanks for talking to us today.