 Hi and welcome to another 5 minutes with Harold Feld where we try to take insanely complicated boring stuff and make it slightly less boring because this stuff is important. Now that the FCC is looking at allowing paid prioritization, aka fast lanes, I want to raise something that's a concern. Something I call virtual redlining. You're probably all familiar with the idea of redlining. It's the idea that companies look at zip codes or they notice that certain kinds of customers live in those zip codes and they don't go there. So Verizon, for example, built out Fios to a whole bunch of zip codes in the Washington DC metro area but did not build out Anacostia and other neighborhoods in DC. That's redlining. They draw a redline around the map and say, those guys don't look to us like good customers. We're not going to go there. It's a typical problem for folks in rural areas because people tend to think, well, they're poor, they're rural, they're not as good customers. And of course, people make all kinds of stereotypical assumptions if you're in minority communities about what you do and you don't like. Now let's add paid prioritization. So we're going to have companies and they're going to be offering these services. Now until now, when you bought an internet connection, it worked the same wherever you were. Yeah, you might have a redlining problem that people weren't building a high-speed connection to you. But if you had a connection that was five megabits down, one megabit up, whatever, and wherever you bought that, it worked pretty much the same. The content worked the same. Now we're talking about prioritization. They have a company like, let's pretend somebody like Barney's decides they're going to offer some kind of high-end online service. They're not going to want to pay to prioritize to every single customer. They're going to go to Comcast, to Verizon, to all of these ISPs and say, hey, rather than buy the millions of customers that are on your system, let me just buy a couple of zip codes. I have a particular targeted service because I know the kind of people who are going to want to buy my service and I know the kind of people who aren't going to want to buy my service. Now those people, for varying definitions of those people, will still be able to access the service through their standard internet connection. They just won't get the high-end prioritized good service because the company that's offering the service doesn't want to pay the extra money. Now it won't be Comcast's fault or Verizon's fault or any ISPs fault. They're just going to offer what these guys want. Now they'll even have very good reasons. They'll say, well, you know, don't you want small businesses to be able to build up their customer base slowly? Don't you want local content to be prioritized to local people? All kinds of efficiencies. This will be good for consumers. It'll just be an unfortunate coincidence that the same businesses that make stereotypical decisions about who their best customers are and who they think ought to be buying their service in real space will make the same decisions based on the same bad stereotypes in cyberspace. That would be very unfortunate because until now, at least if you could get a connection, it worked the same for everybody. But starting sometime soon, if the FCC allowed paid prioritization, we're not going to really be able to rely on that stay in the same.