Tom Wheeler

There's nothing wrong with being capitalists.

I'm a capital C capitalist myself.

The reality that we find ourselves in today, however, is that as the digital age evolved, these companies ended up

making the rules and the result is the digital economy is the largest unsupervised component of the american economy when you have a lack of supervision and you have companies making the rules as though they were pseudo governments ultimately you end up having a negative impact on

the consumers, on the public interest, on the rights of individuals.

And so what I'm proposing is that we need to celebrate this kind of innovation, but we need to put guardrails around it to protect consumers, competition, truth, and the kinds of things that we've seen get pummeled lately in the digital environment.

Well, let's just start with the basic.

Your private information and my private information, it used to be that it was our information.

It was our information.

private goings on.

And the internet has allowed it to be inexpensively captured, stored, and sorted so that it has become less your personal property and more a corporate asset without any rules.

You know, it was Mark Zuckerberg who a few years ago unilaterally said, you know, I don't think privacy is a social norm anymore.

And changed the rules at Facebook in terms of what kind of information they would gather about you.

And from privacy comes essentially everything else.

Out of that basis, that set of assets that are your information and my information, comes the ability to control markets because he who controls the asset, the principal asset of that market, which is data, the information, the private information, controls the market.

Gee, I think you and I probably look at different sources of information then because lots of – there is a huge percentage of American consumers who worry about their privacy.

I think to your point –

There is also a large, well, I haven't got any choice in this situation, which is a reality that I face.

I mean, you just hit on a very, very key thing here, Mike, that if I am going to get a service, a digital service,

As a condition precedent to receiving that, I have to sign away.