109.2 – Christian Dawson (Internet Infrastructure Coalition)

Teaser

Christian Dawson: Those of us who are putting lots of time and effort into quality of service can stop eroding the value of the service that they’re providing. They can stop having to drop their price again and again and again to compete against those companies who don’t care about their customers. You can tell the difference between the two.

Jesse Friedman: And whether it’s a server in your garage, which is still possible or what’s more likely is that you’re paying WordPress.com or Bluehost or someone else to host your website for you. I think the work you’re doing there to create that line for the people who are writing the laws is probably one of the most important things that are happening right now.

Christian Dawson: I’m also a firm believer that the kind of open web things that we are still doing in our environment they’re helping people build their dreams, in ways that put them in the driver’s seat that let them control their brand, that let them control their destiny. And that in every small way, that we have control over changes the world.

Jesse Friedman: Welcome back to Impressive Hosting, where we seek to uncover the core tenets of great WordPress hosting. I am your host, Jesse Friedman, and we are back with Christian from i2Coalition. We were having a great conversation in the last episode about how you are helping to build an alliance to inform hosting companies of legislation that is affecting the way in which the internet is going to be created and consumed about how hosting companies can work together.

It was a fantastic conversation. We were talking about a launch party that you’re having at CloudFest.

CloudFest: The Ultimate Hosting Conference

Jesse Friedman: CloudFest is an interesting conference. It’s a great opportunity for hosting companies and others in the same industry to come and spend a week together at an amusement park in the middle of nowhere in Germany.

Have you been going to CloudFest for a long time?

Christian Dawson: This might be my 12th or something like that. I’ve been going to them forever. It’s honestly my favorite week of the year. I love it.

Networking and Experiences at CloudFest

Jesse Friedman: It’s kind of a pain to get to, but then once you’re there, it’s all encompassing.

Christian Dawson: This is how I describe it to others. For those of you who haven’t been, we literally take over a theme park in, I think it’s called Roost, Germany. It’s called Europa Park, and they have 11, 12, 13,000 hosting and cloud professionals there. And it is so hard to get to.

Jesse Friedman: The only thing that I have a problem with CloudFest is fitting all the great conversations in every year. I seem to provide smaller and smaller little blocks of time so that I can get more and more meetings because they are so beneficial. And it’s funny because I’ve mentioned this just now, and I mentioned previously too, that it is a pain to get to because you either need to fly into Frankfurt, Germany or fly into Zurich and you need to take a train or drive in.

I might sound like I’m complaining about it, but it’s actually one of my most favorite parts of the trip because I have intentionally gotten lost, going from Zurich into Roost. So I remember, actually this was funny. The GPS on the car that I had rented would tell you what country you’re in.

And, on my way back, I said, you know what, I’m gonna turn off the GPS. I’m just gonna know I have my flight in about six hours. I have plenty of time. I’m just gonna get lost. I’m just gonna go find a fun town. I found this small little French village and there was no one there.

It was so quiet and I went into this little restaurant and I swear to God, they must have never seen someone from the States. It was such a quiet little village. They probably get no tourists. And it was this very cinematic look where these men who were sitting in this cafe were smoking cigarettes and reading the newspaper, and they all at the same time bent down and looked over their newspaper to see me standing there looking to see, felt like getting a meal.

No one spoke any English. I didn’t speak any French. I ended up walking right back out of there. The owner of the restaurant was so hospitable and so sweet. She came out to me, she saw me and she put a table out on this veranda where I got to overlook this old church and everything else, put a whole spread out and just fed me for an hour.

It was such a wonderful experience, but on my way back there was this bakery my wife wanted me to go to on the border of Switzerland and France, and I couldn’t find parking and so I had to keep going through the border control over and over again, and the GPS on the car kept switching between Swiss and French and Swiss and French.

And I was probably switched between those countries six or seven times just trying to find parking. It’s a fun experience. You can get totally lost there and really find, you get to see more of the world, more culture and everything else. And that’s coming off of a great conference where we had probably 30 meetings in a few days.

Christian Dawson: It’s such a cool part of the world. I think that French area that you’re talking about, that’s right across the border from where we’re at, I think they call it the Alsatian region.

Christian Dawson: People, if you’re trying to picture it, if you haven’t been, it’s the world of Beauty and the Beast is what it is.

Jesse Friedman: There’s wonderful bridges. It’s a gorgeous, small little area. But anyways, CloudFest is fun. So if you’re on the fence about going, and you want to have some serious networking opportunities, if you want to see some good sessions, I’m giving a few talks this year.

You’re giving a couple yourself, I think.

Christian Dawson: I’m on stage a whole bunch of times. In addition to talking a couple of times myself, I tend to be the interviewer in a series of sessions. We have CloudFest Thursdays, where we try to bring in internet legends, people that have built the internet over the years. And so it’s the Vince surfs of the internet, people that are in the Internet Hall of Fame, and traditionally I’ve had this role where I would go and interview with a whole bunch of them, and we’ve got a couple of really interesting ones this year.

Jesse Friedman: That is a pretty cool role.

Christian Dawson: I’m going to be interviewing a guy named Dave Crocker, who is one of the couple of people that sort of invented email.

Jesse Friedman: Right.

Christian Dawson: The creation of email and what the story of email – how cool is that? But what I really wanted to highlight is that we mentioned that we are gonna have a Secure Hosting Alliance launch party.

Jesse Friedman: Right, right.

Christian Dawson: And the number one thing I want people to take away is if you’re showing up, show up early, show up on the Monday the first day.

Jesse Friedman: Yep.

Christian Dawson: On that Monday, March 17th from 1900 to 2100 hours we’ve got a launch party. It’s gonna be a lot of fun. It’s at the Schloss Alazar there in Yoruba Park.

You don’t need to remember it, but if you go to the i2C website, you can RSVP for it. And come.

Jesse Friedman: So you don’t have to be in the alliance to join the launch party.

Christian Dawson: We would love to have relevant hosting providers there. But no, you do not need to be a member to help us celebrate our launch.

Jesse Friedman: Now, how hard is it to become a member? If I’m a small hosting company? Is it an extraordinary expense? Is it gonna cut into my margins? How hard is this?

Christian Dawson: We mentioned that we’re asking for contributions in order to participate. What we do is we have a tiered membership system where we have a recommended contribution based on revenue levels. Our membership director; her name is Hillary Osborne. If you were to talk with her hillary@i2coalition.com, she would send you the rates and say, you know, take a look, based on what you know your revenue to be you can line it up with our recommended membership level, in accordance with that level of revenue and just let us know and we’ll send you an invoice and then you’ll be considered a member once you pay. And what we do is try to create an environment in which anybody who wants to participate can participate based on the size of their company. And frankly, you know, our thought is that the bigger companies have more at stake so that they can afford to pay more. But the truth of it is that we’re not checking anybody’s books.

Jesse Friedman: You are not looking into anybody’s books.

Christian Dawson: Right. You put an inquiry in for membership. You’re gonna see a list of recommendations on what you can pay. And you fit something into your budget and I think good things come from organizations that work with us.

Jesse Friedman: It’s a very mutually beneficial opportunity because you strengthen the voice that you have in the acting change by having a larger group of people working with you, but also they get a lot of benefit out of it as well. And that comes with regular meetings that I’ve participated in that are so informative and helpful in understanding what’s going on and what we need to be turning our attention to.

But there’s also more practical things as well, right? There’s a badge that allows you to define that you are a member and that can help you with explaining to your customers that you’re taking this stuff seriously.

Christian Dawson: In order to explain that, maybe I oughta mention that in addition to Secure Hosting Alliance, having a launch party at CloudFest, we’re also doing a panel, and you’re gonna be on that panel.

Jesse Friedman: I am.

Christian Dawson: Thank you in advance for being on this panel. Let me read what the panel is called.

The Importance of Ethical Hosting

It’s called Ending the Race to the Bottom, how to Secure. How secure and ethical hosting can drive trust and profit. So I’m gonna say that again. How secure and ethical hosting can drive trust and profit. We talked in the first part about how we were gonna get together and we were, or the plan was to collectively decide what responsible behavior means in hosting. Once we’ve done that, the goal is to create a trust seal. And for people to be able to, us to be able to work to make sure that people are committed, to what it is we collectively decide is responsible behavior. And then once they have that. To be able to have a trust mark that they place on their website that somebody can click on and they can find information about what promises that means they’re making to their customers. Now this stuff hasn’t been built yet. We’re bringing people to the table so that the industry can collectively decide what should go into it.

But once it’s out there, the way that I see it. There are a lot of well established companies who work really hard to do really right by their customers, they’re competing with fly by night folks who make pretty websites and resell services, maybe to make a few quick bucks and move on. And they don’t have quality of service and they haven’t put time and effort into establishing really good protocols to make sure that the customers have great experiences. And it’s hard today to differentiate the two. If we as an industry sort of collectively decide what it looks like and there are some markers to show what a customer commitment level looks like our hope is that there’s gonna be less of a need to compete with those types of companies and maybe a result. Those of us who are putting lots of time and effort into quality of service can stop eroding the value of the service that they’re providing. They can stop having to drop their price again and again and again to compete against those companies who don’t care about their customers. You can tell the difference between the two.

Jesse Friedman: Right, right. A lot of the acquisition element of that business is driving those lower and lower prices and it’s gotta come from somewhere. So if they’re giving you unlimited websites for 99 cents a month, there’s something happening there that’s justifying that. Right.

Christian Dawson: I’ve hated the whole time I’ve been in this industry. I’ve hated the word unlimited.

Jesse Friedman: You know what’s funny too is if you talk to hosting companies a lot of time, even though they’re selling unlimited websites, the number, the average number of sites is usually quite small that are actually being implemented. It’s another mechanism to make it seem you are getting more and more and more.

But what I think it actually does is it tends to devalue the actual individual website that you’re getting out of that product.

Christian Dawson: And that has negative repercussions for the entire ecosystem. If we collectively don’t control the messaging around that, and we don’t right now because we don’t collectively do anything in the hosting industry, or at least not much. So this is a real opportunity for leaders in this space to come in here and say, what does the industry think and believe?

Jesse Friedman: Yeah, sure. That’s great. Alright, definitely if you’re going to CloudFest and try to come to the launch party. If you are not going to CloudFest, but you’re at home, go to the website that was recently launched and it’s secure. What is it again?

Christian Dawson: hostingsecurity.net.

Jesse Friedman: hostingsecurity.net. Thank you very much.

I’ll never forget that again. And, and so we want to, we wanna bring in as many hosting companies as possible.

Christian Dawson: And that, but what about the folks at home who might be listening who aren’t a hosting company? If you’re running an agency or a website. These are maybe the citizens of the internet who are building on the internet and using these hosting companies to run their businesses or, express their voice or whatever it might be. If they have concerns, if they want hosting companies to do different things, do things better, is there a way for them to communicate and share their ideas?

Christian Dawson: I’m gonna answer the question in two different ways. I’m gonna uplevel things to the ecosystem. The ecosystem that i2Coalition supports is actually very similar to the one that Secure Hosting Alliance supports. It’s the Internet’s infrastructure. And so if you’re a part of the infrastructure, if you provide services to, you are in some ways adjacent to the ecosystem of the hoster we still want you to be a part of this community. There’s still a role for you. In fact, we’ve got a few companies that are a part of the Secure Hosting Alliance that don’t actually provide web hosting themselves. Now. They don’t have a vote. When it comes to deciding what the ultimate principles that hosts hold themselves accountable for there’s no reason why anybody who’s not a host should be able to subject a host to a set of principles. But they can speak and they can be a part of the conversation that happens. So you can join as a member if you’re a company who’s a part of the general ecosystem. And you don’t need to specifically be a hoster. When it comes to internet users I’m eager to find ways that we can take the things that we’re doing and find opportunities to get more user feedback. Let me give you an example of something like i2Coalition. The parent organization of Secure Hosting Alliance did another project. So we’ve got another subgroup of i2Coalition called the VPN Trust Alliance and the VPN Trust Alliance in many ways was sort of the template for what it is we’re trying to do with the Secure Hosting Alliance. A lot of the major VPN companies of the world got together and they decided that they needed a set of principles for a very similar way. And they’re a little bit further down the road than the hosting providers are. In fact, you can go to VPNtrust.net and you can find out what their principles already are.

‘Cause they’ve already gone out there and published them. Already got their own trust deal. But they did after they came out with their principles as they put them out for public comment. And maybe that’s what the hosts do. We don’t know yet because, we haven’t got the right people at the table that we haven’t advanced the conversation enough and we’ll still see. But the VPN companies said, we think these are right, but do our users think that these are right? Are these fair should we take further feedback from the rest of the rest of the people who matter to us? And do they, are they gonna hold us accountable and they’re gonna wake us, wanna go further? And we made a whole bunch of tweaks to the principles that the VPNs put forward after they get a whole bunch of user feedback.

Jesse Friedman: That’s great. Long ago I used to work in the car dealership industry. I was building websites for car dealers. Actually, one of the reasons that I got into business eventually was because Matt Mullenweg, my CEO the co-founder of WordPress. He came into Automattic as a developer, but he saw that I had skills in business and one day he basically just moved me into the business division at Automattic. This was eight years ago. And, and I think honestly I put a lot of that into, if I could sell to a car dealer, a car, a salesman, I could probably sell to anybody, but one of the things that I learned about the way in that, which that industry runs is that manufacturers Ford Chevy, Honda, whatever, they communicate directly with end customers through these dealers, and they share marketing funds or give them referrals or whatever it might be based on the scores that the end customers give directly to the manufacturer. So I wonder if there’s something there where the Secure Hosting Alliance might be able to use the hosts in the Alliance.

Could communicate directly to end customers back to the Secure Hosting Alliance and give them the opportunity to fill out a survey or a form and ask them what they care about, what they expect from a responsible, ethical hosting company.

Christian Dawson: I think that’s a great idea. I think there’s so many opportunities, and that’s a great one of being able to collectively get feedback about what’s happening in the, in the rest of the ecosystem and get feedback that we can use to really make things better for the hosting community and of the hosting community.

Jesse Friedman: I think it’s, I think it’s gonna be a balance for you is trying to figure out not only how you leverage the power you’re gonna have from a collective hosting group, but also how you open up channels of communication to the people who are actually living and breathing on the internet.

And I think a lot of this, you know, we touched on this in the last episode.

The Open Web vs. Social Media

Jesse Friedman: It gets clouded by the actions and the decisions that social media platforms are making because a lot of times people see that as the internet. My daughter Alexis I might actually do an episode on this. She showed me a video that really targeted her generation, she’s 17.

Where an individual who’s very passionate about the open web and the old web and the weird web was describing the internet to folks. And one of the things that they had said was this, these algorithmic based super patronized websites that we call the internet, or it’s not the internet.

You know, Twitter and Facebook and Instagram is where you might be spending the majority of your time, especially that generation. But there’s so much more out there. There’s a much bigger web out there. And I think that it’s so important for us to kind of recognize that, right? We’re at a point now where it’s very important for us to define the lines between social media, closed platforms that run on predatory algorithms versus an open web where you have the freedom to say what you want.

And the only thing that you need to do is some help with hosting. Right.

Christian Dawson: I could not agree with you more. I think you’re absolutely right about all of that. To add to it. I will say that as people try to untangle some of the predatory activities that you’re talking about, people being concerned about, on social media, there are plenty of, there are plenty of groups who are self motivated to throw the open internet under the bus if we let them. Right. And so this collective voice. Not only is there so much more that we can do with this collective voice, but we need it to not get thrown outta the bus and to make sure that resource continues to exist for your daughter and for our kids’ generation who honestly, they need the open web more than they need social media, right?

Jesse Friedman: Absolutely. 100%. Yep.

Christian Dawson: And we have templates. Your point about the auto industry it’s one of tons of mature industries that have realized that they can do more together than they can apart.

Jesse Friedman: Right.

Christian Dawson: There are big problems the industry has, and unless there’s some key organizing on some important issues, all gonna suffer, right?

The whole industry’s gonna suffer. That’s ultimately what we’re doing here, right? We’re trying to help the industry that we love mature, right?

So that it survives. We’re trying to help it mature so it survives.

Jesse Friedman: And we need to create a defensible law wall against these closed walled gardens, right? They have a walled garden. You’ve, once you’re in it, you’re in it, and it’s very hard for you to get out. One of the things, not from a legal standpoint, but the things that we talk about internally, and I’ve been saying for a very long time, this is that an end user, a brand affiliate or someone who’s running a brand or a blog or whatever it might be, they need to own their influence. And it’s funny because they don’t actually understand this, that because they’ve built up a large campaign on Instagram or they have a big Facebook page following or whatever, social media has its place, it can definitely shortcut you into communicating with end customers or end users.

But what is that? What is that sacrifice you’re making, being beholden to an algorithm that you have no control over, that you can’t communicate with your audience? Outside of that platform? There’s legislation that can change things overnight. TikTok may or may not go away. We’re not sure right now, but for a minute it was definitely going away.

It’s not just that Instagram can make a decision. For any reason they feel that you are no longer going to rank inside their algorithm, that you’re no longer gonna show up for people. You went quiet for a month because you went on a vacation or a sabbatical or whatever it was, and now you’re gonna pay the price for another six months while you build up that audience.

It’s not the same way with the open web, and you have this direct connection with your customers, and if something were to happen to your hosting company, the underlying platform behind it, you have that mobility. Matt talks very heavily about the importance of data liberation and the ability for WordPress to create an opportunity for you to move your website around as you need to so that you’re never, you’re not losing that and, overnight, you’re just washing away everything you’ve built. Tiktok’s a great example of this. There’s so many companies out there who have started a business, created an e-commerce website that started selling products around the following that they created on TikTok and instantaneously overnight the algorithm can change. People can leave malicious comments for the purpose of having you down voted, whatever it might be. And all of a sudden you’ve hired people, you’ve built a business, you started an LLC, all these things, and it’s all just washed away because you have no further connection with your end customers.

And we watch all the time where people create a new account and they try to get people to follow their new account and they have to try and grab people to move from one. If you are on the open web. And you have subscribers to your site, your blog, your products are being sold through an open platform like WordPress.

You own that relationship with that customer, and that’s where it’s so important for us to maintain it. And that’s a little bit less of a legal issue, but more of a, the ethical conduct of these social media platforms that they just want control. And I think that’s left behind in a lot of people’s minds.

They don’t recognize that.

Christian Dawson: I agree with everything that you’re saying. I’m also a firm believer that the kind of open web things that we are still doing in our environment they’re helping people build their dreams and, in ways that put them in the driver’s seat that let them control their brand, that let them control their destiny. And that in every small way that we have control over changes the world. Back when I was running my hosting company, one of my favorite stories to tell is that we helped shepherd the early days of Etsy.

Jesse Friedman: No kidding.

Christian Dawson: Yeah, literally a guy, a sweet designer who did some work for us on our own website named Rob Kalen, was a founder of this site that he helped make because he and his friends wanted a Southern knitting project. And we watched them go from a little project that they were sort of baiting with us to one that very quickly became our biggest customer, and ultimately one that was too big to exist only on our network. And they ended up developing their own data center because they’d grown so quickly. And in the meantime the number of small businesses that launched around the world of people who were self-employed selling their own crafts and things that exploded on something that we helped birth into existence. And I’m very proud of that. And the type of thing that we, in this industry do for our customers every day. And it’s good we’re, we are giving good to the world and I wanna preserve that kind of ecosystem that we’re providing.

Jesse Friedman: I mean, if you think about our core mission at Automattic, it’s democratized publishing, right? It’s the idea that anyone in the world can have a voice, can sell a product, and talk to the world, tell the world what’s going on in their region of the planet. And I think that’s what really the internet was really made for.

Well, it wasn’t necessarily made for that, but it was definitely the hope that we had that it would evolve into that. And for a while it was so beautiful and wonderful. And the advent of social media, definitely I think people got very excited for it, but now where we are and the fact that the majority of traffic is funneling through these sites, I think people are just blind to what the internet actually is and can be. So it’s definitely a worthy cause you’re working on there.

Conclusion and Final Thoughts

Christian Dawson: We’re doing the advocacy, but we’re trying to collectively, be a responsible voice. But in the meantime, we’re trying to do it in a way that raises the bar in a way that hopefully gets the providers that are associated with it some credit for doing the good that they’re doing right.

Christian Dawson: You can see some benefit yourself, and hopefully you’re also building your own business network. We are trying to build community. And so being involved with Secure Hosting Alliance gives you an opportunity to find a really important business context to help your own organization grow.

So come join us. It’s gonna be a lot of fun.

Jesse Friedman: Yeah, that’s great. Go to hostingsecurity.net if you’re a hosting company to join. If you aren’t a host and company, but you have something of an opinion about this. If you want to share your ideas please just, fill out the form. We’ll figure out how to create a greater open line of communication there.

And if you’re going to CloudFest, don’t forget the launch party. I’ll be there myself on the 17th. I look forward to seeing everybody there. Christian, thank you so much for being on the episode. I’d love to have you back in the future. I feel we could keep talking about this for hours.

Christian Dawson: I’ve got lots of stories that I would love to come back anytime you have me.

Jesse Friedman: That’s awesome. Great. Well, I’ll see you soon in person in Germany.

Christian Dawson: We’ll raise a glass to the start.

Jesse Friedman: I love it.

Christian Dawson: Alliance.

Jesse Friedman: I love it. All right, well take care and thank you everybody for joining.