AT&T and MCI are a giant step closer to pricing power over the Internet backbone because of a 2003 visit to a topless bar.

The visitor was apparently Savvis CEO Rob McCormick (left), , who with just three friends ran up a bill of $241,000, paid for it with an AmEx card, then disputed the charge for two years.

McCormick, 40, was canned Wednesday.

But this was no ordinary lover of the dance. McCormick transformed Savvis after joining it in 1999 from Bridge Information (later bought by Reuters).

Back then St. Louis-based Savvis was a medium-sized backbone and hosting provider whose big innovation was the use of Private Network Access Points (PNAPs) to reduce latency. McCormick transformed the company, taking it public in 2000, then buying Cable & Wireless' U.S. assets in 2004 for a reported bargain basement $155 million. While Moore's Law of Fiber was turning backbone provision into a killing field, in other words, McCormick was one of the killers.

Savvis is now known as a data center company and tthe leader in what McCormick calls "utility computing" -- virtualizing services and breaking the link between the applications and the hardware they supposedly run on. Here's how he put it to Infoconomy in July:

"You should not buy from someone who says they can cut your spending by 3%. The real problem is to cut your spending in half, or you are not going to get anywhere. Unless you fundamentally change something, rather than incrementally change it, then you are not going to fix it."

As you can tell, McCormick was aggressive, hard-charging, a major player and change agent in this business. He may have been the most dangerous man in America to those who preferred to sell bandwidth through an eye-dropper in order to pay off 30 years of old technology.

And now McCormick's gone. They're raising a toast to his memory in San Antonio tonight. Hopefully for them it's just cranberry juice.