CloudFest USA Q&A with Christian Dawson

We’re ramping up here at Cloudfest USA and we hope you’re as excited as we are! But CloudFest USA isn’t just thought leadership and big ideas once a year. Welcome to our first published Q&A, an interview with Christian Dawson, co-founder and executive director of the Internet Infrastructure Coalition (i2Coalition), as well as co-founder and senior partner at Open Eye. 

Editors Note: This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity

Could you let the readers know what you’re up to now and a little bit about the projects you’re currently working on?

A: I’d be happy to. I helped co-found the Internet Infrastructure Coalition (i2C) about 13 years ago. At the time, I was helping to run a Web hosting company and a piece of legislation was being considered by Congress which would have significantly changed the intermediary protections to make hosts responsible for the content of their users. Companies like mine at the time wouldn’t have survived, and so a group of us went to Congress and ended up finding ways to make a real impact and stop this particular legislation.

I realized that the biggest problem was that people in Congress didn’t understand how our industry worked and there was no advocate for us to explain it. We ended up founding the i2Coalition to teach legislators how the internet works and advocate for the small businesses in the space.

I also started a consultancy (Open Eye) with a few key people from my old hosting ecosystem. I still like solving for-profit problems and helping to run businesses because I love the team I get to work with. 

I saw i2Coalition recently announced the creation of a Secure Hosting Alliance. Could you please share a bit more about this new creation and what your goals are?

A: The Secure Hosting Alliance is going to be the biggest new project that i2Coalition has done since our founding. When i2C started, everything that we did was designed to help the Web hosting community. Over the last 13 years, we’ve expanded to encompass the entire Internet’s infrastructure, and started subgroups for different parts of the ecosystem. 

But we’ve realized that Web hosting continues to be a target for legislators. Our intermediary protections continue to be a target for legislators, and so we need to come together and agree on what ethical principles and responsible behaviors are in hosting. 

There is a lot of fly-by-night hosting out there, where people buy resources that have no quality of service behind them, and it ends up putting the entire industry in a race to the bottom on price. Our hope is that once we establish a set of principles, we can say here are the standards that should be met and we can share a list of companies that are truly investing in responsible behavior. It can serve as a resource for businesses to know that if they’re putting the trust of their entire business into a Web host, they know they’re getting the best.

You’ve mentioned a couple times that there are legislative problems for the Web hosting industry. With a new administration taking office and a Republican trifecta controlling the government, what new policies and challenges are you keeping an eye on?  

A: We are going to stick with the areas that we are always focused on when it comes to making sure that we are operating a sustainable ecosystem. Three big areas of focus for us will be intermediary liability, consumer privacy and encryption.

We are going to be keeping a very close eye on government access to data and due process. This has always been important, and I think will be increasingly important in this environment. Some of the areas we’re talking about are going to be better than before, and some are going to be worse. We don’t know yet exactly what will happen, but we are making sure that we are a watchdog, keeping an eye on things for the whole industry.

Let’s talk about Cloudfest USA! What topics are you currently most interested in? What gets your excitement levels up?

A: Too many to even name! We’ve got new Chinese models coming in for AI which supposedly use a significantly smaller amount of power and resources, and are said to be open source. I’d love to hear about how this will change things when it comes to the data center environment that our companies and hypervisors that we are leveraging are going to operate in. It’s going to be fascinating to plot out this AI arms race.

One of the interesting things I’ve been thinking about, since the event will be taking place in Florida, is data center investment. With the recent announcement of Project Stargate, the new administration has said it will support a $500 billion investment project in data centers.

I mean, my God, if there’s a $500 billion investment in new technology going into new data centers, how does that affect the availability of the servers that we need to continue to operate? So many questions come from a raw infrastructure perspective that we need to talk through. And I just think that it’s going to be the perfect time to work through all those in Miami, and the perfect location for it.

Now let’s have a little fun! Last year at Cloudfest USA you moderated both fireside chats and panels. If you could pick anyone currently working in this space to interview in a fireside chat, who would you pick?

A: Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia. Given the questions I just talked about with regards to the evolving role of AI and its continued needs for power, and the increasing specialization of CPU, I’m thinking about the story of Nvidia and how Nvidia raced ahead as a known specializer in AI processing and I’m interested in talking to Huang to talk to him about that specialization, about how they see it moving forward in the future, and about their relevance to our industry!

And now lastly, expanding the horizon a little bit! If you could pick anyone, dead or alive, for a fireside chat, who would you pick?

A: Nolan Bushnell, the founder of both Atari and Chuck E. Cheese, two wildly different things. He really ushered in home gaming in a way that really changed the face of the world in so many ways, bringing it to people in such interesting ways. I feel like I could have a lot of fun unpacking that history, including giving Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak their first jobs! It would be interesting to play a game of what-if with Bushnell around the advancement of games and with games moving to the internet.