Should Voice-over-IP Be Regulated?

dj_due asks: "Here in the Philippines where technology is still catching up, the NTC (equivalent of FCC) will regulate the use of voive over IP, and currently it is not allowed. They proposed that ISP's who engage in internet telephony will be required to pay the telco's access charges. Should the telco's care if we make our phone calls over the Internet?" I can see reasons why telephone companies might want to control VoIP technologies but only as long as telephone lines remain the current way people connect to the internet. With broadband technologies coming of age, people will find other ways to connect to the internet, bypassing the telephone companies entirely. Do you think allowing telco's control of how VoIP is shaped may be setting a dangerous precident for later?

Comments

Also, A Tax On Pedestrians...

[Seumas]

In the spirit of this regulation, I would also propose a tax on pedestrians who walk on the sidewalk and cross streets -- after all, they are depriving auto-makers of their rightful monies by taking alternate methods to transport themselves to their destinations.

Likewise, auto-makers should be levied an additional tax which would subsidize the horse-breeding and equestrian 'industry' for the loss in revenue that the new technology (automotives) have torn from the hands of the horse-trade, by using the same streets with an alternate vehical as a method of transportation of individuals from one location to another.

It is only fair that new technologies and services be responsible for continuing the financial well-being of the services and past technologies they are making obsolete.
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seumas.com

Heinlein summed up...

[Lunatic]

...this type of situation quite succinctly:

"There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or a corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute nor common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back, for their private benefit. That is all."

-- Robert A. Heinlein ("Life-Line")

-Lunatic

WTF is a Telco anyway?

[chazR]

I am British and European, so this rant is flavoured.

In the old days, the organisation that ran the mail (usually government-owned) also distributed telegrams. (After G. Marconi pulled his engineering/marketing magic, this went international). Then these scary 'telephone' devices became available.

There is an apocryphal tale (references, anybody?) of a mayor of an American town saying 'The telephone is a wonderful invention. One day, every town in America will have one.'

However, the postal companies were the ones who delivered the telephony. To this day, the 'big' telecoms provider in any region is referred to as 'The PTT' (Post, Telegraph and Telephony). British Telecom, Deutsche Telekom, France Telecom are the obvious examples.

Unfortunately, these dinosaurs have failed to wake up. Small, agile little companies are desperately trying to eat their lunch.

Even more unfortunately, the PTTs are desperately clinging to their last monopoly - the local loop. The PTTs own the copper from the local exchange to the customer's wall socket, and they will do *anything* to cling to that.

Cable providers are working hard to get more delivery to the customer premises, and deliver bandwidth to the home that is scary ( I have seen cable modems achieving 10Mb), but that is irrelevant.

Here is my point: The PTTs are used to charging by the second, at 64Kb. That business model is dying. The smaller service providers know this. They are hanging in there until the dinosaurs die. Trust me, the dinosaurs *will* die.

Modern customers are happy to pay for bandwidth. Burst bandwidth, commited bandwidth, quality of service. These are the things a customer will pay for. Charge by the minute, charge by the megabyte and you are dead.

Message to the PTTs: Wake Up and Sell the Bandwidth. There are plenty of hungry people out here who are waiting to eat your lunch.

Or, put simply (and on-topic again) charging extra for VoIP is the death-rattle of a PTT. We shall feast on it's rotting flesh.

Is it possible

[addaon]

Another question is whether it is even possible to regulate sufficiently advanced VOIP. From what I understand, VOIP works by using a standard UDP connection, and simply sends packets representing voice information. How can this be detected as being VOIP, rather than any other UDP-using application? Even if the contents can be uniquely identified as containing sound data, how can we know this isn't some internet equivalent of a radio station? And lastly, what if we slap a thin layer of encryption over the packets (currently, the computational cost of encryption/decryption makes this unlikely, but that will soon change) so that they're not recognizable? Given this, peer-to-peer VOIP is indiscernable from acceptable, unregulated traffic.

Re:There is no such thing as a free lunch.

[Private Essayist]

"The great majority of Internet Users dial in via their home telephone line. If they start making phone calls over said line, the phone company (which owns the line) is losing out unfairly"

Wait just a sec. You contract with the telco for phone service for a unlimited use rate. It's a contract, with both sides agreeing.

Now that some users decide to take the telco's at their word and really use the lines in an unlimited manner, and the telco realizes, "Uh oh, when we said 'unlimited' we didn't really think they would actually use it that much" and decides to change their contracts, you defend them because they are "losing out unfairly"?

What's unfair? Unlimited means unlimited. If you go to a restaurant that advertises unlimited buffet dinner for a certain price, and you keep going back for seconds, and the manager finally kicks you out, do you defend the manager because they were "losing out unfairly"?

Sorry, they made a bet about consumer behavior and lost the bet. Nothing unfair about it, just short-sighted on the telco's part.
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