New Frontiers on the Information Superhighway:
INTERNET TELEPHONY FORUM
White Room
National Press Club
529 Fourteenth Street, N.W.
CLOSING REMARKS
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1 MR. IRVING: I'm going to do a wrapup.
2 I'm going to begin my ending as I began my
3 beginning, by thanking the VON Coalition. I also
4 want to thank the folks at NTIA, particularly
5 Kathy Brown.
6 It's amazing how many things can happen
7 in 18 months. When I listen to Sandy, none of us
8 were not thinking about how we were going to
9 address this issue because none of us were
10 thinking about it until our friend at ACTA put
11 that forward. There are some issues that I
12 thought were important. Somebody asked me as I
13 went over back to my office whether there was a
14 definition for Internet telephony and others were
15 saying we should never use the term Internet
16 telephony because when we use it, people want to
17 regulate voice on the Internet as if it's a
18 telephonic service. I agree that we should stop
19 regulating a tin can on a string.
20 When you start talking about this as a
21 telephone, if you set the two cans on either end
22 is a telephone and somebody would want to
23 regulate it. We'd have 50 states and 156 nations
24 with regulators.
25 The definition that I heard that I
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1 think was the best definition was that this just
2 isn't plain telephone service, but that it's
3 multimedia. I don't think there is or will be a
4 perfect definition. There are some other things
5 that made an impression on me.
6 I tried to be quiet because my mom said
7 it's important every now and then to open your
8 ears. Some of my colleagues, I think are shocked
9 not saying anything to the end of it. I really
10 wanted to hear what people were saying. One of
11 the things that I was talking about, this is
12 about more than just telephone calls. I think
13 that was the first thing on our mind. We'll have
14 a different opinion on that going forward.
15 I think the point that Danny made that
16 this, we have got to keep in the front of our
17 mind the privacy of the user. That's why the
18 last answer, who is going to win, the consumer.
19 That's what we want to have happen every time,
20 have the consumer and user win.
21 We want to stop thinking from the
22 traditional top-down regulatory models because
23 they don't and won't work in this arena.
24 None of us 18 months ago could have
25 figured out where we were going to be today. Not
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1 one of us can figure out where we are going to be
2 months from now. If we use traditional top-down
3 regulatory models we are not going to get this
4 right.
5 There is a role for government. One of
6 the roles for government is to educate, make sure
7 people understand what this is about. I think
8 for the Federal Government, the U.S. Federal
9 Government too, one, we need to educate domestic
10 partners, the states and the cities about what
11 this is, and I think by using the Net -- and a
12 lot of folks here were from those particular
13 jurisdictions -- it's also important to regulate
14 our friends and colleagues overseas. There is a
15 need to make sure internationally we don't do
16 things to create barriers or obstacles.
17 As I was listening to Robert and I
18 don't mean to pick on him, but it was
19 interesting, but we talked about the investments,
20 Nortel, AT&T, and to my mind, that is a good
21 thing.
22 Premature government involvement which
23 stifled that investment, we wouldn't see the
24 hundreds of millions of dollars that's going to
25 be invested if in fact government started getting
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1 into this and regulated right or wrong because
2 the fear of regulation will stifle some of that
3 investment. We see it time and time again in
4 telecommunications where people did not make
5 investments. We are trying not to get involved.
6 I want to talk to my friends in
7 Finland. I want to talk to my friends in Iraq,
8 Asia, who have concerns about what Internet
9 telephony means for AT&T. Among the benefits of
10 staying out of it are increased efficiencies in
11 economy. Among those benefits are how they are
12 going to enter the 21st Century. This new
13 information age will become information
14 societies.
15 There are more than 65,000 people
16 working in ISPs and there are hundreds of
17 thousands of people who are working in the
18 industries that have been created because of what
19 Internet telephony means, not Internet telephony
20 by itself, but the bundle of technologies
21 surrounding it.
22 You can create hundreds of thousands of
23 jobs on this planet and those countries that are
24 going to be part of this are going to have to
25 focus on that, but one thing that is absolutely
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1 right, and I can give kudos before I criticize,
2 Robert, is talk about universal service. He is
3 right. It is probably the most important issue
4 that we don't have even closer answers for, how
5 we are going to change the old model and go to
6 universal service model.
7 Yes, we have universal service
8 precisely because we have subsidies in this
9 country. We have the same rates as Canada
10 because we say we are going to take explicit and
11 implicit subsidies.
12 We are moving away from that while we
13 move from a monopoly model. 80 percent of the
14 world's households don't have a telephone.
15 50 percent don't have a telephone at home.
16 99 percent of the people in this world do not
17 have a computer in their home. So we have got to
18 figure out how to lower the prices and lower the
19 barriers. You can talk about Internet telephony
20 but you don't have either a computing device.
21 The debates we are having here today aren't going
22 to change those numbers.
23 As you see things like PCs and Web TVs
24 and those kind of devices, and I think Bill Gates
25 is probably right, we do have the capability in
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1 this world to get most of the people connected to
2 some type of communications network.
3 It shouldn't have to be food or
4 telephony -- food, shelter and clothing most of
5 our lives. I think most people believe that
6 communications, while not one of the big three,
7 is probably the next one after those three. And
8 the types of these we are seeing are going to
9 include those.
10 This was discussed a year ago when
11 Kathy went to an Internet conference in New
12 York. Kathy started talking to the people from
13 the VON Coalition today. There are a lot of
14 people that put this together, but because of
15 Kathy, we pushed a lot further.
16 We know more about each other, we know
17 a lot more about where this technology is going
18 to take us. We have to continue to talk to each
19 other.
20 I don't know about you, but I learned a
21 lot today. I'm going to leave here today with
22 more questions and answers. I am going to leave
23 here today with more questions than I walked into
24 this room with.
25 When you look at the aggregation of
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1 minds and intellects out on the Net, if we keep
2 talking to each other, we'll get this thing
3 right. Voices on the Net needs to be voices on
4 the Net. The dialogue began today. We have got
5 to keep going. Thank you very much for coming.
6 I look forward to talking to you all either on
7 the Net or in the next months and weeks. Thank
8 you.