Skype: Mr. Silverman goes to Washington

WASHINGTON - As the Obama administration moves into the nation's capital, Skype President Josh Silverman was in town this week to shake hands and kiss babies among members of Congress and policy mavens. Skype wants to make sure its views are heard on net neutrality, wireless openness, the universal service fund, E-911 and national broadband policy.

While Skype is, in Silverman's words, "a little piece of software," the company wants to make sure that its software runs unfettered on any computing device consumers use, preferably under a universal regulatory regime applicable to all forms of access - wireless, cable and telephone.

Speaking at the "State of the Net" conference on Wednesday, Silverman said Skype was especially concerned about two issues. "To continue to have innovation, it is important that the people who control the access to networks don't get to pick and choose what applications you get access to," Silverman stated. "We look at wireless openness as another area where it's extremely important for consumers to have a choice of network provider and wireless applications."

Silverman warned the audience that the U.S. "can't take for granted" its historical leadership in innovation, noting the appearance of Skype out of little Estonia, which has a population of only 1.35 million people, according to its statistics bureau. Cutting-edge mobile applications are coming out of Asia, not North America. "If we aspire to have the U.S. have 100 percent of innovation we have some work to do."

Broadband is a big concern. If taxpayer dollars are used for extending broadband, Skype wants to see a "quid pro quo" from carriers using the money with open access and net neutrality provisions. Silverman defined broadband as access, "...faster than 50 Mbps. Anything less than that is just supporting the status quo."

Skype currently has 378 million registered users and adds 300,000 new users each day. More than 7 percent of international calling minutes go through Skype, and video calling continues to grow. Around 40 percent of the billions and billions of minutes Skype records each quarter are now attributable to video calls.

From those millions and millions of users, some fraction pay for Skype products, possibly choosing SkypeOut to make a phone call to Europe for 2 to 3 cents per minute. All those pennies per minute added up to a healthy $146 million last quarter and the company's seventh consecutive quarter of profitability.