Vint Cerf, Google's "chief internet evangelist" and an early innovator of the Internet, spoke to me by phone from Stockholm Tuesday, days after he sent a letter of support for net neutrality to the Federal Communications Commission .
Cerf, who co-designed the TCP/IP communications protocol used to construct the Internet, addressed criticism that Google is getting a free ride off of carriers and explained why he thinks the high-tech world needs those net neutrality rules.
Here are two exchanges from the phone interview:
Why do you think there should to be open-access rules, and why now?
This matter has been around for several years, and debated hotly. And as for why now, the FCC chairman specifically put this on the table in a significant way in his proposal to begin a notice of proposed rulemaking.
[Snip]
With your letter, you've joined a lobbying battle ahead of the FCC's vote on its proposal for new net neutrality rules. How will these letters impact the FCC's actions Thursday?
A notice of proposed rule-making is just that. So I think hard to predict what will come out. The issue is nondiscrimination against applications and against consumer choice. That should be clear by the letter from my colleagues, and by others, that the fundamental concern is that the provider of broadband service not be able to take advantage of that to act in an anticompetitive fashion against others that are trying to provide competitive applications using the same broadband facilities.
See Also: Full Text of Letter to FCC Signed by:
Jeff Bezos of Amazon; James Geiger, CEO of Cbeyong; Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist; Jay Adelson, CEO of Digg; Kevin Rose, founder of Digg; John Donahoe, CEO of eBay; Charles Ergen, CEO of EchoStar Corp; Erick Blachford, former CEO of Expedia; Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, Caterina Fake, founder of Flickr; Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google; Barry Diller, CEO of IAC; Reid Hoffman, CEO of Linkedin; Scott Heiferman, CEO of Meetup; John Lilly, CEO of Mozilla; David Ulevitch, founder of OpenDNS; Josh Silverman, CEO of Skype; Stan Glasgow, President of Sony Electronics; Thomas Rogers, President of Tivo; Evan Williams, CEO of Twitter; Gilles BianRosa, CEO of Vuze; Carl Grivner, CEO of XO Communications; Steve Chen, founder of YouTube; Mark Pincus, CEO of Zynga.
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