Jonathan Christensen is Skype’s General Manager for Video and Audio.

Today, I’m speaking on a panel at the Open Mobile Summit, talking about ‘disruptive voice’. We’ll explore both the business and technology sides of communications innovation, and one thing I’ll raise is the issue of net neutrality. Tomorrow, my colleague Christopher Libertelli, who leads our Government Relations team in the Americas, will be speaking on a similar panel in Ottawa for the Public Policy Forum.

Some of you may be aware of our ‘wireless Carterphone’ petition to the FCC in the US (PDF). It demands that the regulatory body allow people to use any mobile device on any mobile network, free of restrictions imposed by cellphone networks. This is critically important to the future of mobile communications – without this freedom, competition will be stifled, and mobile device and connectivity prices will remain high.

More broadly, Skype supports the idea of net neutrality. Skype is opposed to unreasonable bandwidth caps and believes that unreasonable limits on use of an internet connection should be declared illegal. Of course, reasonable limits are perfectly acceptable so long as they are made clear to broadband users so that people know what they can and can’t do with their connection.

As a result, Chris and I were excited to hear the news that the FCC transition team includes two honest-to-goodness thought leaders, both of whom have a keen understanding of the innovation that is occurring at the edge of the network: Kevin Werbach, (from the University of Pennsylvania, Supernova and ex Release 2.0 fame) and Susan Crawford (from the University of Michigan, Yale and One Web Day). Both understand how government policy is made. Kevin has been running one of the best internet and public policy conferences in recent memory and Susan, in particular, is one of the clearest and passionate advocates for openness on the Internet.

The transition to the presidency of Barack Obama can only be a good thing for mobile openness and net neutrality in the US, and we can certainly do better than settling for ‘competition’ between the likes of Verizon and AT&T. Instead, these folks understand that a ‘multi-modal’ innovation policy will empower consumers to choose not merely between AT&T and Verizon, but between hundreds of software applications on the internet such as Skype.

Skype believes that government policy which allows any app to run on any device, and on any network is the right thing for everyone, not just Skype users. Chris and I are hopeful that we are moving from a bankrupt era of deregulation and broadband indifference among legislators in North America to an era where policy is being made by the digital natives. We have a sneaking suspicion that innovation policy changes may be just around the corner…