 Hi, and welcome to another five minutes with Harold Feld, where we take incredibly complicated, mind-numbingly boring things and try to make them slightly less complicated and mind-numbing because this stuff is important. You know what? Time to actually get serious about the phone system again. For a hundred years, we've had five fundamental principles that are the foundation of our phone system. We've worked this as part of our social contract, and this has been part of what makes our phone system so great and so useful for everybody. First principle, service to all Americans. That's the first line in the Communications Act to provide for all Americans. That's been our commitment since day one on the phone network social contract. Doesn't matter if you live in a high-cost rural area, you get phone service. Doesn't matter if you're deaf and we have to find technical means to accommodate you, you get phone service. Doesn't matter if you're poor, we have a regulated basic service. We've got the lifeline subsidy, you get phone service because we've made a decision as a country that this is such an important thing to have and it keeps us all so connected together that we have 100% access to phone service, or at least we try. We must not be the first industrialized country to walk that back. We cannot be the first country that says, you know what, we don't take care of each other anymore. We don't need 100%, 95% is good enough. Principle, foundational framework two, interconnection and competition. The reason why we can have different phone networks in this country is because we have something called an interconnection requirement. Networks have to interconnect with each other. That means if you're a Comcast landline subscriber, they have to pass through the phone call when you call AT&T Wireless. If you're an AT&T Wireless subscriber, they have to pass through the signal to Comcast. That's worked out very well. We were able to move away from some of the natural monopoly regulation from the Mabel days because we had interconnection for competitors. And we had a bunch of other rules that promote competition also. But what happens when those rules go away because nobody's a phone service anymore, because it's on magical internet? Well, if Comcast and AT&T Uverse can't make a deal about NBC programming and so I can't watch the Tonight Show, that's annoying. If Comcast and AT&T Wireless have a peering dispute and phone calls don't interconnect with each other so that 50 million people can't call home, that's not annoying. That's a disruptive disaster. So fundamental principle number two, interconnection and competition. Fundamental principle number three, consumer protection. We expect a lot out of our phone system to protect us. We have good privacy protections. We got Truth and Billing on our basic phone service. You're entitled to a basic quality of service on your landline, traditional landline phone. None of that applies necessarily in this all new IP universe if all of the regulations go away. Nobody wants to live in a universe where the phone company can see how many times you call and send out for pizza and start giving you pizza ads and start selling that information to anybody else. We need to maintain our high level of consumer protection in the IP phone world. Fundamental principle number four, network reliability. You know, we just had the Superstorm Sandy. We've had a whole bunch of places where we've been reminded that the old copper network that had its own power and blackouts, it was built to 99.999% reliability. It was designed to survive these new weather events. Modern IP networks that don't have these same kind of rules are not as reliable. And heck, sometimes they just go down. Last week, AT&T had a software upgrade that knocked out phone service to 70,000 UFERS customers. Oops! That is not acceptable. It has not been acceptable in the copper world. It should not be acceptable in the new IP world. Network reliability is key to a reliable phone system. When I pick up that phone and dial that ten digit number, it works every single time. Fundamental principle number five, public safety. We all are used to the 911 system. We depend on it. Our lives depend on it. We depend on it to work under all sorts of conditions. And now that we have new means of communication, we're actually expanding 911. Something called next generation 911. We have location now on our cell phones so that ambulances can find us when we have a medical emergency or police can find us if we have an emergency. We're talking about text messaging to 911. We're making good advances on 911, but we have to make sure that that public safety piece fits with the rest of the puzzle when we move to the new IP network. The bottom line here is that companies like AT&T that have asked the FCC to reexamine the phone rules and change the way we look at networks because they're becoming all IP are right. It's time to rethink these rules. We don't want to stick with old rules for the last 100 years just because they're comforting and familiar. We want the technology to improve. We want to see these companies invest. We applaud companies like AT&T for saying they're investing $14 billion in their networks. But while the technology improves, the social needs and the goals remain the same. There are five fundamental principles that we believe are key for the last 100 years. And we think they're the key for the next century in building the phone system that we are all going to be depending on.