Welcome to a tech policy podcast. I'm Ashken Kazarian. On today's show, we're going to talk about the Internet Essentials. Joining me, I have Karima Zay Dunn, Vice President Digital Inclusion and Internet Essentials Comcast Corporation. Karema, thank you so much for joining the show.

And I'm so happy to be here. Thank you for hosting us here today, Ash. Absolutely. You came a long

way. Not a lot of people come all away from Philadelphia to record this, and I really appreciate that.

And I'm really glad that you're here because the topic we're going to talk about is near and dear to our hearts

at Tech Freedom. And I think to everyone, it's about the digital divide and the inclusion

of everyone in our society into the internet as a societal being, into the internet economy,

and just into the tool that makes everyone's life better and easier.

So not a lot of people might know about your program.

So let's start with the digital divide, just kind of the event and the situation itself.

How are you guys addressing it?

So you're obviously vice president of digital inclusion.

What is the way Comcast thinks about this?

Sure.

So here's how we think about the digital divide.

It's about 23% of households in this country that don't subscribe to the internet at home, which is probably

a little known fact. So the internet, the broadband plant is actually built out to their

homes, but they don't subscribe to it. So we, all of us who use the internet every day, we wake

up in the morning, we do email, we check the weather, we do online banking, travel.

I mean, think about all the things that we do online that most likely we take for granted every day.

So these folks, they don't have a wireline subscription at home.

And that's the basis of our program here. Now, they likely have

smartphones. But when you take a deeper look at that 23%, you see that these communities are largely

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