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TechnologyDaily Mobile
Getting The Word Out On Telephony
by Sarah Lai Stirland
As legislative counsel at Consumers Union, Chris Murray spent 2003 orchestrating behind the scenes to reverse the deregulatory tendencies of the FCC as the agency reviewed its media ownership rules. The maneuvers of Murray and his boss Gene Kimmelman, along with many others, stirred national interest in the issue. Congress ultimately rewarded their efforts this year when members of the Senate voted to approve a 39 percent national station-ownership cap rather than the 45 percent that the FCC initially had proposed.
Murray's new job as director of government affairs at Internet telephony start-up Vonage, announced Friday afternoon in an e-mail to friends and colleagues, will again place him at the center of the action as Congress reconsiders the Telecommunications Act of 1996. He is joining an organization that generally argues for fewer regulations, not more. He hopes to make them see, however, that the enforcement of rules to protect the 'openness' of the broadband Internet is crucial to the firm's survival.
"Anything I do, in leaving the consumer advocacy side of things, there will be snickers," he acknowledges. "[But] the interesting thing about Vonage is that it's a company that represents what's possible with an open Internet. Absent that openness, a company like Vonage can't exist," he said.
Over the past couple of years, representatives for applications providers and e-commerce businesses such as Microsoft and Amazon have lobbied the FCC on an idea called 'network neutrality.' The companies are concerned that the owners of the pipes - the telecommunications providers -- may be tempted economically to discriminate among packets and thus hinder access to Internet users, who are shopping online at Amazon or using the Internet to watch videos, listen to music or to make telephone calls. Vonage is by definition part of the applications provider camp because as an Internet telephony company, it is another application used by consumers to communicate telephonically using Internet technology. It is not clear what position Vonage will take on that issue.
Murray's friend and industry colleague Gigi Sohn, president and co-founder of Public Knowledge said Murray's switch is not that much of a change. "A lot of the rhetoric isn't going to change. Consumers Union is all about lower prices for consumers...It's not going to be a stretch for Chris to talk about how the government should be careful about hurting an innovative phone company at the altar of protecting incumbents," she said. As a lobbyist, Murray is effective because he's dogged, yet not dogmatic, she added.
Sohn credits Murray with getting the digital rights management debate a fair hearing on Capitol Hill in the Senate Commerce Committee.
"Senator [John] McCain, being the chairman of the Commerce Committee, is very respected -- to have a leader like that [interested in the issues] who has a more moderate approach is important," she said.
Murray, 31, does not know where his new office is yet. He is Vonage's first employee in Washington. An outdoors enthusiast who attended Florida Southern College as an undergraduate on a water-skiing scholarship, he said he will continue to skateboard to work.
Pulver.com, the IP communications company that holds conferences and runs FreeWorld Dialup, a free Internet-telephony application firm that the FCC ruled was an 'information service' earlier this year, hired Jonathan Askin in mid-April as general counsel. Askin, 40, was the president of the Association for Local Telecommunications Services, the leading national trade association representing facilities-based competitive local exchange carriers.
Askin, who is the son of two law professors at Rutgers University (where he attended law school) and civil liberties advocates, is working on establishing the newly re-christened Global IP Alliance, a group that Pulver.com founder Jeff Pulver and Askin hope that will persuade telecom regulators around the world that self-regulation is the answer for IP communications. Pulver has plunked down $100,000 to kick-start the operations of the group, Askin said.
Registering Their Concern
In the world of domain names, registrar GoDaddy.com of Scottsdale, Ariz., has hired The Dutko Group to keep track of domain name issues in Congress. GoDaddy.com recently was keeping a close eye on H.R. 3754, a bill to provide criminal and civil penalties for domain name fraud. In its earlier drafts, the bill would have given some of the responsibilities for verifying the domain names to registrars, and would have made them liable for fraudulent names. The Dutko Group's efforts managed to eliminate that language, although the compromise is that the bill still does not provide specific exemptions from liabilities, said Christine Jones, GoDaddy.com's general counsel. GoDaddy manages more than 4.7 million domain names, making it one of the biggest registrars in the world.
In other news, Whenu.com of New York City has hired Dow Lohnes & Albertson to lobby Congress on a passel of spyware bills: S. 2145, S.2131 and H.R. 2929. Whenu.com has come under fire recently for its privacy policies and for trying to "outsmart" search engines into returning high ranked results on only positive information about the company.
Also last week, the Recording Industry Association of America announced that it hired Michele Ballantyne as senior government relations counsel. Ballantyne was general counsel for Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D. Ballantyne is scheduled to begin her new job this week.
In the open source world, Redhat announced earlier this month that it had hired Michael Cunningham as general counsel. Cunningham joins Redhat from IBM, where he was associate general counsel.
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