Net neutrality heats up with the FCC (The 3:59, Ep. 321)

[MUSIC] Welcome to The 359, I'm Alfred Ng. I'm Ben Fox Rubin. So net neutrality has been an ongoing battle for several years on Capitol Hill and it feels like every time the proposal is struck down, it comes back even stronger. Yesterday's orders by the FCC commissioner, Ajit Pai, may be the closest we've seen net neutrality approach its death. If you're out of the loop, killing net neutrality would essentially mean the end of the open Internet. With net neutrality, you can expect to pay a flat fee for access to everything online. Without it, ISPs would be able to choose what speeds certain websites would be able to get Imagine having to pay extra if you wanted to watch us on YouTube or a start up website never getting any traffic because its speed is limited. Pai issued his order on Tuesday and the FCC will vote on it on December 14th. There's been massive protests online about this as there is every time, but do you think that This is kind of it for net neutrality? Yeah, probably, the Republicans are running things at the FCC right now. They have three votes versus two votes for the Democrats. And essentially, under the Trump administration, there's been a big push at deregulation. So I would absolutely expect net neutrality to Die off, at least under this administration. It just feels extremely frustrating because it's almost as if, literally everyone outside of the FCC and ISPs are all in agreement on this. That net neutrality should stay the way that it is. You see these massive protests online nearly every time the proposal is brought up. The FCC has their own comments section that got Flooded with people just saying don't do this. This is a terrible idea and it just seems like what was the point of all of this if you're just going to ignore it anyway. That's a good point but I'm personally of two minds when it comes to net neutrality. It's obviously pretty easy to say hey net neutrality which also sounds really positive is a good thing but at the same time I think that the ISP do at least have Some argument here, as far as saying that having too much government regulation when it comes to the internet, it stifles innovation, it stifles investments, and they have an argument there. And to at least listen to their side I think is reasonable. Yeah, when in other news, Uber announced yesterday that it had suffered a breach affecting 57 million accounts in November 2016 yes this happened a year ago and Uber's only telling the public about this now. The company said they had paid the hackers $100,000 to delete the stolen data and said that it had assurance that the data was destroyed. There's a lot of issues with that. Uber is based in California which does have breached disclosure laws. Which you're supposed to inform the public within a certain amount of time, not a year. [LAUGH] This is a company that has kept a lot hidden from the public like its Greyball program, which helped block police, meant to catch their drivers, and their Hell program which tracked Lyft drivers. The company's new CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said it was wrong for the company to have kept this a secret for so long. I mean do you think this is kind of the final nail in Uber's coffin. No. Because it's scandal after scandal after scandal. Absolutely not. The got rid of the old CEO. This is the new CEO New CEO gets kind of this honeymoon period to air out the old dirty laundry. And I, I think people are actually celebrating the new guys saying. Way to go! Way to reveal this bad practices from the old Uber. You're now- I know. The happy. I know. Friendly Uber. I know a lot of people in the security community were saying you should never Pay hackers, cuz this happens a lot. I mean, the hacker HBO's breaches during the summer, just got arrested, not arrested, indicted yesterday and he demanded $6 million for that. They didn't pay him either. So Ben, you also wrote a story about the future of Black Friday shopping and augmented reality and in virtual reality. Does this mean am I getting crushed by a suburban mom that really wants that discounted toaster in VR now? Yeah, absolutely, I think that there's a very good possibility that that could happen, and I certainly look forward to that future. Well, that's all the time that we have. If you like what you heard here check us out on CNET. I'm Alfred Ing. I'm Ben Foxford. [MUSIC]