Federal operations and we do business in 50 states, so we have interactions with commissions across the country. We have those interactions that are pretty significant. I also run a Public Policy organization, and i run both at the state and federal efforts. We also have International Interest as you are probably yoy aware when we acquired directv, we acquired an ongoing satellite business. It is by a large wireless provider in mexico and we have a satellite business in mexico. We have an enterprise basis and for the most part it is corporate customers and they do business across the world so we have barely significant interests in europe, asia as well as latin america and mexico. When it comes to capitol hill and washington would you be called a lobbyist i dont qualify under the standards placed in congress and its over capitol hill every day. But i direct the efforts. Before we introduce dave, what is one of the biggest issues at t is working on when it comes to capitol hill . We have so many issues but i think from a corporate perspective, one of the most important issues for us is the tax reform agenda. The ceo of the company plays a pretty significant role over the Business Roundtable and i think the Corporate Tax reform is the critical business issue. We have all the regulatory issues that we deal with in daytoday but they are very important. In terms of getting the economy growing and creating jobs in the United States, there is nothing that would be more significant than finding a way to over our very noncompetitive federal Corporate Tax rate stands at 35 and is getting more into the competitive areas where other countries are. I know about the Trump Administration and leadership on the hill wanting to lead the lee world. It would take a significant effort to be more competitive with europe and other countries. Pardon me. To help us break down the Telecommunications Issues that you are dealing with, let me introduce you to dave shepherdson. There is no shortage of the regulatory issues. The biggest one is Net Neutrality and the proposal to roll back title ii. Will there be another framework that will maintain the rules and where do you think the commission might come down . Ive been in washington for over 20 years and if that neutrality feels like its been around for the bulk of those 20 years. As a company, weve been very supportive of rules to ensure an open internet. I dont know if this gets mischaracterized but it certainly gets mischaracterized by our opponents on the other side of this issue but we have been very supportive of the rules that preserve an open internet and i think you can basically throw them into a category of no talking or throttling, no censorship. We are not going to direct where people go on the internet and we have never been opposed to rules that proposed the status quo back in 2010 when my predecessor was in this job, you know, people forget he actually was the democratic witness in congress. The thing that we have been opposed to is the application of the common character roles in a technical nature. All the independent companies it is an antiquated statutes that could use a significant update modification. Ultimately we felt it was going tthat it wasgoing to lead to sit rate regulations and if we back up into a Regulatory Environment i think it is going to impact the investment that goes back into the markets. That is what he saw and why we moved away from that regulation back in the 1990s, and i think that it would have had a negative impact not only on the company but the jobs we create and the investment that is going to be allowed to happen. I think that we are hopeful through this process we will end up with a basic open internet principle and rules that could be enforced that would ensure the open internet and walk away wanting to draw froonce and fore regulation under the Communications Act of 1944. I think that is the danger. We are in washington and we know the pendulum swings back and forth repeatedly in this town. My fear has always been what ever this commission does, there is no question that the chairman and the commission can move forward and take it eliminate. But if the political pendulum swings the other way than we have the next fcc coming back in and just backtracking a. Then congress used the act to overturn that. The congressman proposed legislation to harmonize the rules. The data is protected under what statutory or Regulatory Regime does that just make sense . I am very much in favor of the congresswomans privacy bill, because it does the things that are most important, which is it does three things that i think are critically important. It says everyone has to live under the same rules. In the world that you are seeing Business Models id come and you call them the Website Companies. Companies. That may be how google and amazon and others are started, but they are more than a Website Companies today. I think they are getting into video distribution, there is a video product in the marketplace. Amazon has amazon prime and it wont be long before they have their own bundle of content so all these companies should operate under the same rule. That is one of our main contentions by. If location data is sensitive to doesnt matter who is collecting it. If we are going to have the rules around location i should have the same that amazon has or facebook has and that is my principal concern. We will not only have the same rules that we will be in the same Regulatory Environment. One of the difficulties when you have an area like privacy is one area is regulating the free here in another over there you could end up with disparate treatment even if the general framework is the same. It ensures we dont end up with 50 regime for privacy so there is a preemption and a federal rule that everybody has to live with, and its not going to be a patchwork of a bunch of different states. That is very difficult to operationalize. We had this in terms of different regulations and different states. Its harder to operationalize indicates harder to create a patchwork of regulation. Those are the things most important to us and why we support the bill, and the other issues in the bill are not as important to me. Any bill you pick up the things you like and those are what i will be fighting for and why we are very supportive of what the congresswoman is doing. Why do you think google and amazon in the world see these issues differently than at t and verizon and some of the others . I think the car in a better position to answer that. In general, there are a lot of people who dont believe that we are for the open internet, yet we were bigger proponents of the rules in 2010 than google. They did a proposal together and got a lot of blowback from the groups offering different rules and they disengaged in that fight. But we have been very supportive of the rules. I think with respect to the congresswomans privacy bill, theyve articulated that they do not like the standard. To me, that is less important than the equal treatment and regulate her approach, those are thingthe things that are importo us. I think in any debate, when it comes to these issues i think we have more in common than we dont. You mentioned the merger from earlier. There is another merger happening potentially, at t and time warner cable. What is the status . We are going through the process. We initiated at the department of justice shortly after the deal was announced i think that we kicked it off in november. We are going through a process in the department of justice. I think that when he told them m we expect the deal to close by the end of the year and we still have some approvals that hang out. We are not completely done. Some of the big holes in the floor in approvals because we have an operation in new mexico so the deal has to go through that process. We have operations in brazil, but they are not the only ones. So, we are going through a process and the department of justice right now, and our expectation is we should be through that process and the operational issues to be able to close without any for an approval process and we are hopeful and confident that we will be able to get through that by the end of the year. Based on the review by the staff, the senate test to confirm the head of the antitrust division. Do you have any sense of the conditions for this transaction . I think that conversation is just beginning. We are at the point that weve produced all the data and we ane answered all the questions and that will kick off the summer and its not clear to us how far they came out of the committee as you know. It was at a 191 vote. But the timing is going to be tied up with a lot of other disputes that are partisan in nature so we will have to see how long it takes to get confirmed. I think the expectation has been if they get confirmed before the july 4 recess but who knows coming into the environment that is up there today. But, you know, so i think that it is kind of early and premature to find out where they are until we are sitting in a seat that is kind of hard to predict even in the list we see preliminary will be the finalists that they want to close. Obviously theres a lot of vertical integration going on right now in the industry. Verizon just thought aol and yahoo and you are buying time warner that is marrying content. Why is that the right strategy do you think the vertical integration why is it smart to own the content as opposed to license it . After extensive review by the commission to build 12 and a half million fiber to the home connections, and while that is a good start, it is a fraction of our wireline footprint. Its a fraction of the total number of households in the u. S. Who are on the verge of being able to roll out mobile broadband to see if they can compete with wireline broadband. David , if he was sitting next to me, he would hit me and say theyve been competitive for five years. I think we will get to a place where we will achieve fiber like speeds on a broadband infrastructure, on a wireless mobile infrastructure, and we had this debate last year about settop boxes. Nobodys talking about that because thats not the future of video. I think the future will be a combination of a mobile, over the top set up in a 5g broadband infrastructure that will give people the ability to be able to choose to completely cut the cord. I think the reason you want to own content, and if you listen to my boss talk in the week after the merger was announced, he took the view that he had the idea to do something, but when we had 5 million subscribers, you couldnt get the content companies to Pay Attention to you long enough to negotiate the rights. Even when you became directv and that number went up to 25 million subscribers, it was still difficult to get the content companies to breakout of the model that is existed for a long time in this country. I think by having what we consider to be an anchor tenant to create new kinds of bundles, skinnier bundles and bundles that are more acclimated to what individuals want to see in a bundle rather than the 500 channels for 200dollar model which is what the cable industry amounts too, we think the power of being able to have those more particularly bundles of content for consumers combined with the 5g infrastructure will really enhance our ability to compete not only in our wire line footprint, but everywhere. That will take some big changes in big investment. These mobile networks are mobile for the last mile and when we get into 5g and Small Cell Technology they will be mobile for the last couple hundred meters and then we will have to get all of this traffic onto a fiber infrastructure and its basically a wired network from there. It will take an enormous amount of investment but that will create jobs in this country and i think it will really transform the market in ways that are exactly what policy makers want which is total competition for broadband and video subscribers like no one has ever seen before. Thats the vision we had. He talked verizon about their attitude, their moving in a different direction, more toward an advertising only direction but that was the vision we had and why we thought this collection was the most powerful that we could put together. So with comcast moving aggressively into the wireless field, does this be speak that perhaps regulation should not be done in the silos that its currently done in. We started this conversation talking about how antiquated the telecom act is and anybody whos paid any attention to the industry and how its converged would tell you you cant use a statute thats going on 90 years old to regulate this industry. I think there is convergence going on on all kinds of Different Levels whether its verizon competing with google with yahoo in the advertising space, google competing with the Cable Companies in the video distribution space, amazon, i think weve got a lot of Companies Whose interests are aligning and converging. Just look at text messaging. People were really worried about regulating the rates of text messaging ten years ago. We had that huge debate. Can you even believe we spent a minute thinking about that. All the sudden all these Text Messages were on the cloud and whats app and basically the market changed overnight. And we are using a 90 year old statute to oversee it. I think thats a mistake and will lead to mistakes. Look at the price wars on the wireless side. Then you have this constant pressure to unbundle and move more video content to the web. Wheres all this disruption and up . Does at t end up as a wireless company, video provider. I dont know where new orleans up, but i think if you sat in our boardroom with my ceo, i think he would tell you weve got to keep moving because we dont see an end in sight. We have to keep transforming the business and try to keep ahead of the curve. In the end i think we are going to be competing with all those companies, facebook, amazon, netflix, google, were already competing with those companies. Thats why for me the most important things are just to make sure we have a level Playing Field with those guys so we can, when we are competing and have the flexibility to adapt the Business Models that attract consumers because at the end of the day, thats what consumers really like. Everybody likes free for a long time and now i think theyre starting to see that nothings free and data is data and people are starting to clamor for a little more control over that data. Maybe its hybrid models that developed, weve got an enormous amount of criticism from privacy advocates when we rolled out in austin texas, an ad supported internet service. There was a price difference between the 70dollar offer and the 99dollar month offer. If you wanted the ad supported model you went with a lower price. I think privacy advocates screamed about that but i will tell you, we were given people a choice. You could make a choice on that, and i think the privacy revolution, as that involves people want more and maybe thats what consumers want. It seems to be the pricing model in the Grocery Store if you want to have any sale items. I dont know. Allowing the companies to be able to have the flexibility to meet the market demand with the Business Model that makes the most sense and allows you to recover the investments you need to make to stay ahead of the game, i think thats why i always go back to give me the same regulatory structure and im less concerned about the content of the rule as i am about making sure the regulatory structure is right and we have the flexibility to be competitive with these companies coming from different regulatory backgrounds. At t will be taking part in the white house talking about the 5g innovation, what do you think the fcc and the government can do to make 5g a reality . Theres been a lot of talk about it. Its interesting, when google fiber got into the business, they kind of change the dialogue that you had with policymakers about making investments in their communities. I think if you were to talk, i know craigs been on this program, one of my counterparts over at verizon, thetheir experience when they went out and tried to do files which is their fiber to the home product throughout their footprint, their strategy was basically the cable strategy. We will accept the Franchise Agreement and every city, we will go into every city and negotiate with the city to allow us the ability to build a fiber infrastructure. There are cities like boston where theyve never gotten agreement. I think theyve turned that around with the recent announcement, but when google fiber came in and they had the cities competing with one another. They had the cities to say we will come bring a fiber to the home infrastructure no different than what verizon was promising, but we will have you create a permitting and licensing structure. You have to come up with a competitive structure in order to entice us to pick your city to come built in. I think when that happened, we immediately raised up her hand and said we like that structure too, being nondiscriminatory, the cities gave it to us. I think that cleared the pathway to the kinds of investments that need to be made. Ill talk to you about 5g, we had to get small cell architecture out there in densely populated area. Those will be a couple hundred meters apart. Thats an enormous amount of fiber we have to put in the ground. Making sure we have a regulatory structure in place in the states that makes it easy to get permits, to do applications and permits and actually deploying the fiber, that makes that simple and efficient. I think thats the most critical thing we have. We are pursuing some small cell legislation and a number of different states. We been successful in almost up to a dozen states this year. Weve just started that effort this year. Over trying to do is get the infrastructure in place to be able to build the 5g network of the future and i think the focus on policymakers to find a way to make that happen will be important and a lot of these 5g, these cells will going to the public rightofway but a lot of them can be put on things like light poles, things that are already there and we just need the environment that is conducive to make sure th