David Bryson: Why I Joined i2Coalition

The following is a guest post from i2Coalition founding member David Bryson, Executive Vice President & General Counsel of The Endurance International Group.

At The Endurance International Group, we are very pleased to join the i2Coaltion and congratulate all members on the launch of this exciting initiative.

i2Coalition captures what we at Endurance have been seeking to do as we help small and medium size businesses (SMBs) launch and grow a web presence.

For us, the timing of i2Coalition is amazing.

Our CEO Hari Ravichandran presented our legal team with an interesting challenge for 2012.  He asked us to perform our everyday legal services in ways that would help “make the web a better place” for customers and employees. Our scope included everything from training our team on the legal aspects of web hosting … to dealing fairly with our customers and stakeholders … to supporting efforts that improve the web experiences of our customers’ customers … to trying to influence legislation that impacts our stakeholders.

My fellow corporate counsel at Endurance, Jane Shih, and I had been strategizing ways to make an impact.  When we spoke to Christian and David at HostingCon and learned about the i2Coalition initiative, it became clear to us that by pulling together with other Internet infrastructure providers (United we stand, right??), we can make a significant difference.

And so we joined i2Coalition as a founding member.

We believe the goals of i2Coalition are critical to the nation — not just to our industry.

We recently sponsored an O’Reilly Media research report through our Bluehost brand, as a result of a meeting Hari had with Tim O’Reilly.  We realized the true scope of our industry’s impact on the global economy after that research.  The paper says a lot about how open source and Internet infrastructure providers enable the web hosting industry, and by extension, the millions of small businesses that the industry serves. By helping provide small businesses with a web presence that extends beyond geographic boundaries, the community of open source and Internet infrastructure providers and the web hosting industry are significant contributors to our global economy — and that comes with a deep responsibility.

At Endurance, we are working to fully integrate Tim O’Reilly’s motto to “Create more value than you capture” through our efforts to make the web a better place and by helping to found i2Coalition.

We want to see all hosting providers join i2Coalition. In our view, this is a win-win opportunity.  It is a chance to strengthen the Internet infrastructure from a public affairs perspective and by doing so, give back to our users, their customers, open source, and our employees.  We look forward to working with you and other i2Coalition members to make the web a better place.