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6/22/2010
Working both sides of the aisle
Here's why Wilderotter would make a good spokeswoman for her industry. She's the rare phone company CEO who also
has worked at a tech company - Microsoft (Charts) to be specific - so she has some credibility on both sides of the
aisle, so to speak. In fact, she says she placed a call to her former boss, Microsoft research and strategy chief Craig
Mundie, after the whole Net neutrality issue started to come to a boil.
During their call, she says, "Craig told me he was working at Microsoft to come up with a set of guiding principals we
could all sort of live by, a sort of Internet bill-of-rights," Wilderotter says. Internet content companies and telecom players
"can figure out ways to work together," she adds.
Not surprisingly, Wilderotter believes the disputes that pit phone and cable companies against Internet companies
should be worked out in conference rooms, not on Capitol Hill. She argues that no access provider would be dumb
enough to prevent its users from getting to sites such as Google or Yahoo or MSN, or even to popular fledgling sites,
like YouTube.
Such a move, she says, simply would drive consumers into the arms of competitors. (However, Net neutrality advocates
rightly argue that there's not a whole lot of competition for broadband access; in most communities broadband is, at
best, a duopoly).
"To tie our hands with regard to what we can do with these networks, when we're not going to do anything to preclude
[anyone's] access [to them] is crazy," she says. "Legislation should be a last resort."
Despite her diplomatic tone, Wilderotter can also hit back when necessary - another quality the telcos require in a
spokesperson. She is particularly critical of Google's efforts to promote Net neutrality at a time when the company is
widely believed to be assembling its own Internet backbone, and is toying with different access strategies such as WiFi.
"Someone needs to ask Google what its real intention is here," she says. "It is easy to put yourself in the content camp
and tie the other guys up in a regulatory box while you secretly develop a whole access network to go after their
customers."
Those sound like fighting words - and we suspect Wilderotter is up to the task.
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Related:
Wall St. connects with telcos and cable
Net neutrality debates rage at Fortune's Brainstorm
clickability.com/pt/cpt?action=cpt&titl
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