 Hi, and welcome to another five minutes with Harold Feld, where we try to take incredibly complicated, insanely boring things and make them slightly less boring because this stuff is important. Today we're going to play an exciting game of what are Verizon and Comcast hiding? Here's how we play. Verizon's buying some spectrum from Comcast, Cox, a couple of other cable companies, two biggest cable companies. Now along with the spectrum, along with buying the spectrum, they also entered into a bunch of side agreements. Now Verizon and Comcast and the rest of the cable companies all say those agreements don't have anything to do with the spectrum sale. It's all completely innocent. It's just an agreement for Verizon to sell our Comcast and other video products, and for us, Comcast and the cable guys to sell Verizon's wireless product, and an agreement for us to get together and develop some joint technologies. And don't worry about the fact that that looks like the biggest competitors dividing up the world and becoming a communications cartel. We promise it's all completely innocent. Well, just in case you don't trust Verizon and Comcast, not that you shouldn't trust them when they say all our agreements are completely innocent and don't have anything to do with each other, but just in case some of us thought would be a good idea to look. So the FCC went and pushed, and Verizon and Comcast and the rest of these guys finally agreed that they would put those agreements in the FCC record for review under super secret confidentiality order, but they would make a couple of little minor redactions, even though this stuff is already super secret confidential. Well, turns out that when Verizon and Comcast said they were going to turn these things over with just a few little redactions, what they really meant was we're going to black out a hell of a lot of material so that you can't possibly know what these agreements actually say. Let me illustrate what I mean here. So let's pretend this is a page from the AT&T, T-Mobile super confidential stuff. Now, I may have said this shouldn't be super secret confidential, but if they put it in as super secret confidential, they actually put the whole thing in. Anybody who signed the super confidential protective order would get to see this page. Okay. This is what Verizon, Comcast, and the rest of them are putting it. See, a lot of it's blacked out. You never even get to see it. Doesn't matter that you signed the super secret confidential protective order and promised to keep it all super secret confidential. Even the FCC has never seen the stuff that's under the black over here. So you got whole chunks of this agreement that nobody has seen and nobody has reviewed. And when you ask Comcast and Verizon, well, why'd you black that out? They say, oh, well, don't worry. That doesn't really have anything that you need to look at. And I'm like, but the whole point of looking at this is to make sure that there's nothing in there that, you know, might be an agreement between you guys not to compete or, you know, might be an agreement that when you transferred the spectrum, you all agreed to act like a cartel and squash your competition or, you know, any of those kinds of things that, you know, not them saying they're there, but that, you know, might be there under the agreement and wouldn't it be a good idea to check? And their response is, well, you know, we didn't have to put these agreements in any way. So the fact that we blacked all this stuff out that might say bad things or things that are interesting or things you ought to know about, not something you should worry about. Well, OK, maybe I've just got a suspicious mind. But I want to know what are Comcast and Verizon hiding under this black here? And the other question I want to know is, is the FCC going to let them hide this stuff under the black here? The FCC could say tomorrow, you know what? We're not processing your application to transfer these wireless licenses until you tell us what's in these agreements. Because we have a responsibility to check and make sure that nothing in these agreements is related to the spectrum transfer or violates the law. Now, if the FCC doesn't want to do that, if the FCC is going to let Comcast off easier than AT&T, then I think we're going to want to know why. I'm hoping that's not what happens. I'm hoping the FCC steps up here. But until then, until the FCC actually steps up, we all ought to be asking this question, what are Comcast and Verizon trying to hide?