Paul Kapustka's Blog

It's the end of a long first day of Spring 2006 VON, but issue #1 of the show daily is in the printers' hands, scheduled for delivery (by yours truly) fresh Tuesday morning. Given that Larry Lessig is scheduled to speak in about 8 hours, I'm going to be brief here. But I did want to relay some bits of an interview I did recently with ex-FCC officio (and now Cisco policy czar) Robert Pepper, conducted the day Sen. Ron Wyden introduced his Network Neutrality legislation. (there is, by the way, no betting line on Wyden's bill ever becoming law.)

Pepper ("Bob" to many of us) seemed a bit agitated during our call, maybe because I just blindsided him with a direct dial, instead of going through the courtesy of PR channels. To his credit, Bob picked up his own (IP-powered!) phone. And part of what he said was that some Net freedoms -- "you ought to be able to go on the 'Net and attach your own equipment" -- are extremely important, but "NOT inconsistent [his emphasis]" with "being able to manage to network to improve customer experience."

If that sounds like someone who now works for a company that sells million-dollar routers to service providers as well as wireless routers at Best Buy, you understand (as another mutual friend said) "why Bob lasted so long at the FCC." He knows how to play politics. And that's good for Cisco, since they sit in the middle of this looming battle between big service providers and common customers.

Where Pepper -- and Cisco, which didn't have much in the way of D.C. lobbying talent to start with -- will likely try to land is a position that says, "let's not make new businesses illegal before they get a chance to survive." The actual quotes from my interview has Pepper saying: "there needs to be a lot of creative experimentation with different business models -- pro-consumer and pro-competitive models need to be tried. There's a false impression that net [providers] today don't manage traffic. Not all traffic is treated the same. A lot of the debate I've seen [thinks] everyone gets the same thing for the same price."

Pepper and Cisco, unlike the service providers who make Swift-boat type remarks, do understand that the Vonages and Googles of the world are already paying freight. "There is a misunderstanding -- [we know] a lot of content providers at the edge invest hundreds of millions at the edge of networks," Pepper said. "There are cache and server centers. A lot of this debate [seems to be] a lack of understanding, and misinformation, false assumptions. A reasonable way to approach it [seems to be] competitive, pro-consumer [services] at different price points." That's the way it's done, Pepper said, "in every other aspect of commercial life."

He then went into a bit about how Amazon provides free shipping for ordering a certain dollar amount, and another argument that the "cellular model is a good model, with buckets of minutes for different prices." I don't know that either argument holds up when the real Net Neutrality debate seems to be more about whether or not consumers, not service providers, get to pick the winners and losers in the content and application arena.

Where Cisco could go a long way is to provide consumers of broadband services the same kind of network-management statistics its equipment gives to those who purchase and run it. Why not let both sides see what the administrators see, and let users judge for themselves? More tomorrow, after Cisco has its say.

MORE UPDATE, 3/14: Pepper pretty much repeated these same ideas in a lunchtime speech at VON. He added some language about there being "false arguments" but as predicted announced Cisco's line as being somewhere between mandated Net Neutrality and anything goes for the Bells. Guess it makes business sense!

(P.S. -- if you are at VON and are a reader, drop a comment and say howdy. I'll be easy to find at the Comm Policy summit.)