 Hi everybody, and welcome back to Five Minutes with Harold Feld, where we take incredibly complicated, insanely boring things and try to make them slightly less complicated and boring because this stuff is important. What's the most important thing going on right now? Title II, transformation of the phone network, broadband. What the hell am I talking about? These are the critical things that are going on right now. We're transforming the way we communicate. Everybody knows that. We're phasing out the old phone network and we're replacing it with a broadband network. Everybody knows that. But what are we doing to make sure that that network, that new network that's now replacing the old network is going to reflect the fundamental values that we've had governing the way we communicate with each other for a nation for the last 225 years because we have five fundamental values that have always been part of our phone network, always been part of our communications network, whether it was the post office or the telegraph or the telephone. And now the question is, are these five fundamental values going to be part of our broadband network and how we communicate with each other or are we just going to start throwing people under the bus? Five fundamental values, first and most important, service to all Americans. Since the founding of the country, we've believed that one of the most important things about us is we are one country. We don't leave anybody behind. That's why Congress had the power to create the post office and postal roads and we've taken that principle with us from the post office to the telegram to the telephone and every time we have magic happens. It's not just what's right, it's also good business, which leads me to the second fundamental principle, competition and interconnection. Networks work by connecting to each other, connecting people, connecting physical wire, connecting the way in which they can communicate. Consumer protection. Yeah, we have regular consumer protection, but when we talk about something like our ability to communicate with each other, our ability to communicate with government, education, all these things that come out of the network, those are too important to leave to just your regular average background consumer protection. We make sure that we are having special consumer protection on these essential services and that has always included telecommunication. This stuff works, it works consistently, it works the same way every time. 200 years ago that meant you put a stamp on it and the post office got it through come hell or high water. 100 years ago it meant an ability to pick up a phone in New York City and actually reach somebody out in the middle of the Southwest. Today, if that's going to mean anything, it means that we have a broadband network that actually works and doesn't go out every time it rains. Finally, public safety. We put our lives and trust our lives on our communications network. We built the 911 system on the reliability and the availability and the service to all Americans of the phone system. If we're going to depend on this in the 21st century for broadband, we need to make sure that all of these vital public safety services can operate on broadband as well as on the traditional phone network. Remember, we love answering your questions so use the hashtag ask felt and all you trolls don't be shy because we here love to play with our trolls. So at hashtag ask felt.