Kyle McSlarrow, President & CEO of NCTA, recently sat down for a chat with Nate Anderson of Ars Technica. Anderson has written about that conversation today in a post entitled
Cable: let us experiment with metered Internet.

First up, they discuss the issue of caps & metering, which was in the news last month.

McSlarrow doesn’t defend any model; he’s not even partial to metering, having happily lived under flat-rate plans himself for many years. He also won’t defend particular business plans, like those advanced by Time Warner Cable. But what he will defend is cable’s right to experiment.

“I’ve lived under a flat rate plan,” he said, “but I don’t assume… that’s it’s necessarily impossible to believe that you could have a different model in the future.”

That means experimentation, and lots of it, done in the most transparent well with full input from consumers. Without even doing the tests, McSlarrow says there’s simply no way to know whether certain business models will work better than others.

As usage increases over time, McSlarrow says that eventually something will have to be done to handle capacity issues.

“As demand goes in a certain direction,” he says, “someone’s going to have to build a network” to deal with “not just instantaneous peak but, more importantly, average peak usage. The whole point is to do it in a way, and to serve your customers in a way, that they have a great experience. If you fail on the network side to do that, particularly with our shared network, that’s a real problem.”

You can read the whole thing here.

DVR ALERT! Or, heck, you could watch it live…

Each week, C-SPAN broadcasts a show called The Communicators, which features half-hour interviews with the policy makers, opinion leaders and others who are shaping our digital future.

Making a return appearance on the program is NCTA’s President & CEO Kyle McSlarrow. According to this B&C article, he discusses the impact of the current financial crisis on the cable industry, the retransmission-consent “quiet period,” the FCC’s network management ruling, and more. He analyzes the possible telecom policy stances of both presidential candidates.

They’ve switched up the format a little and now include a guest moderator on the program. This week, it’s the Wall Street Journal‘s Amy Schatz.

The Communicators airs Saturday on C-SPAN at 6:30 p.m. ET and Monday on C-SPAN2 at 8 a.m. and 8 p.m. ET. You can also subscribe to the show’s podcast.

NCTA President & CEO Kyle McSlarrow will participate in a National Press Club “Newsmaker” Media Briefing today at noon (ET).

In his address, entitled “Cable’s Broadband Platform: Innovation for the Consumer,” he is expected to challenge the notion that there is a rivalry between innovation taking place at the edge of or in the network. In contrast, he will discuss the notion of an interactive “Internet ecosystem.” He will also discuss new developments in tru2way.

His speech will be webcast through this link [Archive available at this link for 6 months].

UPDATE: It’s also being streamed at C-SPAN’s site. The text of the speech has been posted at NCTA’s website.

Today, NCTA President & CEO Kyle McSlarrow testified before the House Committee on Energy and Commerce hearing on “H.R. 5353, the Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2008.” Two weeks ago, he testified before the Senate Committee.

He spoke of his time at an Internet start-up in the late Nineties, in a dial-up world. From his position, he said he was cheering on the cable industry to roll out broadband. He mentioned “open access,” the previous version of the network neutrality debate, which bears striking similarities to the current discussion. Over the last 14 years, as cable modems have taken off and increased the available bandwidth and over that time, McSlarrow noted, cable’s broadband service has never been regulated.

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NCTA President & CEO Kyle McSlarrow testified today at the Senate Committee on Energy and Commerce hearing “The Future of the Internet.” You can hear an MP3 of his delivered remarks and, earlier today, we featured a post that summarized his remarks.

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I particularly note his remarks at 2:22, when he said:

Every single person here has a blog or a website or has content that has distribution and has enabled consumers, millions of them around this country, to [access] that content and no one is blocking it… We want as much content, we want as many applications to succeed as possible. That’s what makes our broadband service attractive to consumers. And if we ever engaged in conduct that consumers were outraged about, they do have a choice. They can go somewhere else.

He said that while we can have a discussion on what is the most appropriate method of network management, “…there is zero evidence that any operator is engaging in anticompetitive conduct.”

However, despite the paucity of evidence of such behavior, Professor Lawrence Lessig, a big proponent of net neutrality, said that some might argue that we should wait until we see discrimination before we do something about it – which strikes me as a sensible approach to legislation – but that hi-tech investments are made today based on what investors think the network will look like in the future. He says there is such extraordinary uncertainty about what the future holds that it threatens innovation. Threats about what might happen without net neutrality have been around for five years, back to Columbia Law Professor Tim Wu‘s 2003 paper Network Neutrality, Broadband Discrimination. I wouldn’t say that investors are shying away from promising broadband applications.

There was also a great deal of talk about what one person referred to as the United States’ “precipitous freefall” in terms of our global broadband ranking. I refer you back to our series on the problems with the OECD rankings, especially this post: The Truth About Japanese Broadband.