 Hi, I just want to start off by thanking you for coming to my lightning talk today, which is when where you live offline determines if you can be online, the cost of connectivity. I'm Claire Park. I'm a policy program associate at New America's Open Technology Institute, and I'll be walking you through some of the results of our latest cost of connectivity report published this month. So first, if you're watching this video, it means that you have access to the internet. So I want to ask, how much do you pay for internet? I'll tell you how much I pay. I live in Washington, DC, where cost of living is generally pretty high. And I'm charged $64.99 per month for my internet, which reaches download and upload speeds of 100 megabits per second. This is, however, with promotional discounts. If I look closer at my bill, the provider actually charges me $104.99 for the service that I have now. For that same amount, I could get internet at 10 times the speed that I have now in Kansas City, Missouri. And if I lived in Copenhagen in Denmark, I could get the same speed of service for a little more than a third of the price. In fact, in our new report entitled the cost of connectivity, we find that European consumers pay the least for internet service per month, on average, compared to consumers in both Asia and the United States. On the other hand, while you might pay a little more living in Asia for your internet, you also get much faster speeds. These are pretty stark differences in both cost and speed by region, not to mention a significant amount of money month by month and year over year that not everyone can afford to pay. We often talk about today's society being globalized and digital as if everyone's online and connected, but this is really far from the truth. Our study of 760 standalone home internet plans in 28 cities across Asia, Europe, and North America shows that access to the internet is really far from equal. With where you live playing a large part in whether you can afford to be online. This is a big problem, especially given how essential internet access is for being connected to government benefits, to friends and family, to job opportunities, to news and information, to basically almost every facet of modern day life. So to clarify our methodology briefly before I get into other results from the report, from June to 2019 to March of this year, we collected information directly from internet service provider websites all across the globe on standalone home internet plans only that we could locate across each city. So we used addresses and zip codes for real homes to identify plans advertised in different communities and then any prices that were in foreign currencies were all converted to US dollars. This is actually the first time that we're publishing this report in five years. And as in previous reports, the data we collected reflects advertised costs and advertised speeds, rather than total actual costs one might pay or speeds one might actually experience. The difference between what's advertised and actual costs in internet speeds is one of the biggest issues revealed in this report. So advertised monthly prices are not what you might actually pay month to month. There are often just the start of the fees that you pay for your internet service. In addition to the monthly price, you might also be charged additional fees to set up your service like for installation and activation. You might also be charged either a monthly rental fee to rent out a modem or a router or you might also be charged a fee so that you can buy the equipment that you need to actually use your service. Oftentimes, some providers will also charge penalties for if you use too much data on their service. And this is especially true where providers have outlined different caps on data usage on their service. Finally, if you end up hating your service or you just want to switch to a different provider but sign up for a service for a specific time frame, say like 24 months, providers can also charge you a one time fee for terminating your contract early. So all of these fees add up pretty quickly. But what's worse is that providers aren't transparent about these fees. While collecting the data on plans across all these continents, we often recorded no data simply because we couldn't find a lot of the information on these providers' websites or information about differences in pricing over promotional periods, a total lack of information about specific contract links, specific fees that you might be charged. Sometimes we could find the information but it would be shoved very far away on websites in very small font, which is another issue. This is really different from, I would say, our normal shopping experience where if you buy something like cereal or some other item of food at the store, the price will be paying for each variety of that product is clearly shown on each shelf, along with the label on each box showing just how many carbohydrates, how much fat, how much protein, what amount of vitamin B you might be getting from a product. This is really not the case for internet, which is arguably more important and costs a lot more than something like cereal. So current convoluted pricing schemes or obscure contract terms make it really hard for consumers to identify the total cost of internet service and often results in bills that are unexpectedly higher than what someone might have anticipated seeing the provider's website. This complexity also makes it really difficult for consumers to shop around and get better prices. People need to know essentially what they're paying for, which is why one of our primary recommendations from this report is for governments to adopt a broadband nutrition label. So like the tables you might see on the back of different food items, a broadband nutrition label would show just how much you'd be charged per month for a certain contract link, data cap and overage penalties, any one-time fees or any sort of additional fees, and also the speed that you would get with your service. This increased transparency will definitely improve the life of consumers, but there's the issue of making internet just more affordable. So while all of the cities in our data set offer plans priced at or below $50, only three cities in our data set have internet service priced at or below $10, which is a recommended benchmark for low-income households. Internet that's too expensive for people to afford is particularly concerning in line of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, which has revealed just how essential internet service is. So imagine social distancing and sheltering in place at home without any means to news and information about the ongoing health crisis where you might get tested, a way to check in on your friends or family, being able to order groceries or anything else that you need online rather than risking going to a place in person, paying your bills also online or taking advantage of any telehealth services while you can't go to your doctor's office. Also imagine, as is the case for many families now, losing your job to the pandemic and then not being sure if you can afford to pay your bills, least of all your internet bill in the coming months. You might also imagine being a parent and having a kid who has to do some form of distance learning but not being sure whether you can really afford an internet connection for them to continue e-learning. These are real pressures faced in particular by marginalized communities around the world, including Black, Indigenous and people of color and minority populations, as well as low-income households. Recent surveys show that many of these communities have experienced a loss of income due to the pandemic and many are also worried about paying their bills, especially their internet bills. The current pandemic reinforces that internet access is really a necessity and basically a utility and that government subsidies and discount programs are all the more important for low-income households to be able to get connected. So at least in the United States, programs like Lifeline that subsidize telecommunications service costs should be expanded so that more families can be connected. So much of our lives are online now and more so than ever during this pandemic, while we isolate, we really need policies around the world that increase transparency around additional fees and internet pricing and also make internet service more affordable for more people. Internet service can also improve by not being restricted to private providers. Something that we saw in our study is that broadband networks run by cities themselves, what are called municipal broadband networks or community broadband networks, offer some of the best value in the United States with one municipal network in particular in Ammon, Idaho offering gigabit speeds. So 10 times the internet service that I get now at just $15 a month. If you have any questions about the study or the published report, I'll also be hosting a Q and A session during the RightsCon conference. Please feel free to drop in then. And you can also read our study online or download or print a PDF of it here at this link. And thanks and hope you have a happy RightsCon.