Pulver Sees USF Fees on VoIP as Part of Larger Regulatory Dilemma
CHICAGO -- Pulver.com CEO Jeff Pulver will not oppose an FCC move to impose universal service charges on VoIP, he said. An order to that effect, circulating on the 8th floor for the June agenda meeting, would require VoIP operators to remit fees on up to 64.9% of customer revenue. In an interview at Globalcomm here, Pulver blamed investment bankers managing the IPO for Vonage’s lackluster Wall Street debut.
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Pulver is no “fan” of firms using VoIP to dodge rules traditional carriers face, he said: “If the FCC is sending a message that if you're simply replacing other services with VoIP get with the program and this is the price you have to pay to be in that business today, that is what it is.”
VoIP’s problems stem from past regulatory decisions that saw the FCC classify it as a service, not an application, he said: “In the U.S., the VoIP industry allowed itself to go down that slippery slope. That’s why they're mired in these regulatory hassles. One administration at the FCC may have one opinion. The current administration may have another.”
Though he doesn’t back a numbers-based contribution method for VoIP, Pulver said, he told FCC Chmn. Martin at an FCC meeting years ago that may be the best alternative. But, he added: “The last thing we want to do is send a message to Wall Street, take your services and technologies and go offshore and serve other nations. It doesn’t help anything. It doesn’t help our national economy.”
“We've gone the path where there’s been deregulation of the facility and regulation of the application,” Pulver Gen. Counsel Jonathan Askin said. VoIP providers’ situation harks back to an old joke about selling sex. “We're just haggling over the price,” he said. “It acknowledges that there is an appropriate safe harbor price point. Now we're just haggling over whether that safeguard is 30% or 60% or 100%… We think the universal fee should be attached to the transmission facility not the application.”
Pulver sees no negative implications for VoIP in Vonage’s troubled May 24 launch as an IPO, he told us. The stock, down more than 25% since opening at $17, has spurred a class-action suit by unhappy pre-IPO buyers. “I read that as their bankers did a lousy job of bringing it to the market, nothing more,” he said: “I don’t believe that when it went public the bankers actually supported the stock. Maybe they priced it too high. I don’t know. I have seen IPOs come and ago and the stronger ones have strong sentiment from the institutions that invested and felt good about it… I see this as execution on the day of the IPO.”
Pulver, who has a small ownership stake in Vonage, also sees positives, he said: “I was in fact impressed that a company I was associated with was worth $2 billion. They're close to getting $600 million in revenue. I'm sorry, that’s a lot of money.”