As the war rages on whether ISPs can slap tollgates on Internet traffic to generate additional revenue, Tim Berners-Lee (the guy who invented the World Wide Web) wades into the debate with a plea for the U.S. Congress to protect Net Neutrality. While it's nice to have Internet pioneers such as Berners-Lee and Vinton Cerf and leading players such as eBay and Google throw their support behind Net Neutrality, this has become a political battle with the well-financed ISPs (BellSouth, AT&T, etc.) and their lobbyists putting the hammer down in Washington. Sure, you can talk about why Net Neutrality is important to innovation and maintaining an open access environment but there's an awful lots of money at stake, which often takes precedence over ideals or ideologies. The economic reality is the carriers are losing lots and lots of high-margin local telephone customers as VoIP becomes more mainstream. As a result, they argue they have to make it up somewhere if they want to remain vibrant and profitable. With an army of lobbyists at their disposal, they've done a great job convincing many politicians about their "plight". While Berners-Lee is well-respected, it's going to be a huge challenge waging war against money-hungry carriers with lots of political clout.

Are cellphones getting too small and too difficult to use? Are the buttons way too small for anyone other than a child to manipulate? Well, help is at hand with a company called GreatCall that promises its phones are far more user-friendly with bigger buttons, easy to read screens, loud and clear sounds and easy to retrieve voice-mail messages. The company was started by Arlene Harris and her husband, Martin Cooper, who is often credited as the cellphone's inventor. Anyone who's tired of teeny-tiny phones with teeny-tiny buttons should check out GreatCall's JitterBug model. I'm not sure which carriers offer the JitterBug but there's definitely a huge market out there among the 50+ set that just wants a cellphone that works without all those unneeded bells and whistles. 

Veritas Research analyst Neeraj Monga has published an extensive and critical report on Vonage after some serious number crunching. Entitled "Not Too Late to Hang Up", Monga concludes Vonage is a "sell" and its stock is worth less than $5. "Vonage is caught up in the perfect storm," he said. "Regulatory uncertainty, competitive pressures, lawsuits, unhappy customers and a damaged brand will derail its business plan. Time to hang up." While the company's supporters point out Vonage could have 4.5-million to 7-million customers by 2009, Monga said growth will come at a cost: $777-million to $1.28-billion of cash burn. If things come in on the high of the range, he thinks Vonage may have to make a debt or equity offering next year.
  Vonage is starting fight back after a post-IPO quiet period that lasted until June 19. In a BusinessWeek story, spokeswoman Brooke Schulz said "we're not toast", and that people who look at the cash burn are ignorning the fact "we have a healthy business here". That's a certainly optimistic outlook, which it ignores the fact Vonage is bleedling rink ink and it has no plans to become profitable any time soon as it focuses on subscriber growth. It should also be noted Vonage just hired a new senior v.p. of investor relations, Craig Streem, who will a huge job trying to convince the investment community that the company is headed in the right direction. Vonage shares closed yesterday at $8.85, just above the 52-week low of $8.25. Just in case you forgot, the company did its IPO at $17 a share.