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Panama Decrees Block To Kill VoIP Service
An anonymous reader writes "In an apparent attempt to stem telephone company revenue losses due to Internet telephony, the government of Panama has decreed that 46 UDP ports be blocked by all Internet service providers. The ports include ones that are commonly used for voice over IP as well as some that are used for other purposes, apparently with the idea that these, too, could be used to circumvent the POTS (plain old telephone system, a term of art) in making telephone calls."
How difficult could it be to write some software to use VoIP on port 80 or some other commonly used port?
There are 65534 other ports wich can be used for VoIP, they must block them too!
People have tried to fight progressive technological evolution for ages and it has yet to ever work once. Any country making laws forcing its citizens to live behind the times is only hurting itself. What if panama had outlawed the original telephone because it hurt the post office? Granted, Voice IP isn't quite as drastic a step, but it is progress and it will succeed on its own merit, laws or no laws.
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Example: I buy a new tool. It is a clawhammer. For some reason, this deprives the company making nail removers of money, especially considering their old nail removers were overpriced.
So, the government affiliated nail remover maker goes and makes buying clawhammers illegal.
This is immoral. You can't just rent-a-law because your overpriced technology is being smashed by a preferrable alternative.
I mean, just because you can buy laws (ie: riaa), doesn't mean it should be allowed to happen..
The bottom line though is that the government will not be able to control the VoIP "problem" entirely without just pulling the plug on all Internet activity.
Too true.
I'm actually more worried about collateral damage here - if the news report is correct then any traffic passing _through_ Panama would be subject to the filters - stopping any application that just happens to use one of the ports mentioned.
If J.K.R wrote Windows: Puteulanus fenestra mortalis!
Your logic seems flawed to me. When you make a call using voip you totally bypass the phone comapny. YOu aren't costing them anything. THis is like saying that it's wrong to listen to indie band because the riia spent money on the latest release. THe phone companies time ma have come. Just because they were the only way to make calls 30 years ago doesn't mean that now. If voip is a beter alternitive for the people(sound quality and realibilty in exchange for cost) then good for them.
procrastination is a way of life aka i'll think up a sig later
You've kind of missed the key point, though: once it starts becoming harder and requiring more knowledge to do it, the phone company will be safe again. The danger comes from pervasive, easy to use VoIP services which anyone can use. If the decree can drive it back to the point where only a few geeks are doing VoIP it's all a success for the telco.
In the long run, violent overthrow of the government worked OK for the French, English, and the United States. It's more of a last resort, though.
Adapt or die. There is no rule that states established businesses get to do business "the old" forever. If a better cheaper way of doing things comes along, oh well, tough cookies. There were once a lot of blacksmiths as well. So to the phone companies I say, Adapt or Die, better yet just die.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
If the Panamanian government gets serious about this, they could put a stop to VoIP by making it illegal to use VoIP in Panama. Many countries have done this kind of thing in the past. In the UK 20 or so years ago, it was not possible to set up a public internet because of government rules.
There is no money to be made in telecommunication in the long run if technology runs its course. Or at least it is going to gross millions instead of billions. In that situation even the remnants of the industry remaining today would largely have to collapse.
... with Bush's soft stance on monopolies the time is ripe to bring the US a couple of steps closer to corporatism, and after that the WTO and globalization can take it on a world tour, and the combined bribing power of the content and the telecommunication industry might just be the force which can accomplish it.
The industry is too big and too rich to go down without a fight, in Panama this results in naively blatant intervention. In the US the telecom industry will probably pair up with the content industry to outlaw private private peer to peer broadband communication sooner or later, under the guise of security and copyright protection. Only a monopoly or a price fixed ogliopoly will be able to squeeze money out of people on the same scale as today for communications in the future
I fear that in the future the Internet will actually move this way. You want to use Kazaa? Pay a per-hour fee for the privilege. You want to use VoIP? Pay per call. This would kill innovation in Internet services. Would P2P have ever developed if this kind of infrastructure was already in place? No, nobody would have been able to use it because of limits on what they could send over the Internet. The whole point of the Internet is that it is this great 2-way communication medium with nearly infinite possibilities and no limits on what kind of information can travel on it. When you limit what can be transmitted to a few well-known protocols you kill that. Firewalls have already done enough damage to innovation on the Internet. I don't want to be using HTTP to browse HTML webpages served by media conglomerates and POP3 to read the same old e-mail 10 years from now just because ISPs have become complacent and not allowed anything new to develop. I want to be using Freenet and Jabber and other protocols that haven't even been invented yet.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
The US did something worse: they subsidized inefficient transportation in the form of the personal automobile and the required infrastructure to support it. Politicians that must be considered corrupt dismantled public transportation around the country. The result have been urban sprawl and the breakdown of social networks, some of the longest commute times in the world, poor air quality, an unnecessary dependence on foreign oil, and enormous expenses for oil and cars.
As funny as you thought that was, it's painfully close to the truth. The U.S. government recently enacted a 38% duty on all soft-wood lumber imports from Canada in order to protect its own lumber industry. Now they expect Canada to supply raw logs for processing south of the border (not to mention cheap electricity with which to process it).
Two of the problems of VOIP over cable are service reliability and reliability during power failures. The easiest way to fix the latter is to integrate some cheap cellphones into the equipment. Service reliability's a bit harder - the economics of the cable TV business assume that you need enough technicians and trucks to take care of most failures, so customers are happy and you don't need to rebate their bills for downtime very often, but that fundamentally it's just television, and if it goes down for the weekend in bad weather, your customers can read a book or go watch videotapes until you can get it fixed.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Although realistically this is unlikely to be a problem for any significant percentage of Net traffic. Topologically, Panama is most probably a spur on the Internet, rather than a hub. Most of the western hemisphere's traffic passes through the US west coast on its way to anywhere. By the time a given packet hits Panama, I'd lay good odds its actually bound for an endpoint in Panama.
--Ford Prefect