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Speak Up On FCC VoIP Regulation
Back in March, 1996 the ACTA Petition was filed which in effect asked for the internet telephony software companies selling to consumers to be treated to the same regulations as phone companies. While the FCC never ruled on ACTA, the petition started to raise questions about the future regulation of Internet Telephony in the United States and around the world. Some countries were quick to ban internet telephony based on the out of control hype that existed back in the Spring of 1996 while many other countries took a "wait and see" approach.
The pulver.com Petition is in many ways the exact opposite of the ACTA petition insomuch what I was asking for is that end-to-end Internet Telephony over Broadband remain unregulated. After seven years of waiting, now that VoIP technologies have gone mainstream and now that consumers are once again using these technologies and now that these technologies work quite well, I wanted to remove the cloud of regulatory uncertainty when it came to VoIP and broadband Internet Telephony. My hope is that "we" as a community can encourage the FCC for fast action on the FWD petition as a way for the FCC to help encourage investment. Once the regulatory uncertainty is removed, I strongly believe investors will once again look at the VoIP industry as the hot space to invest in and encourage innovation in.
Please take advantage of the pulver.com Petition and share your comments with the FCC. Click here for details on how to reply to the petition.Please reply by March 14th."
Surely the transport mechanism doesn't matter. If you're providing a method for person A to talk to person B why should any one service be deregulated when others are regulated? I think that individuals using this over their broadband links is one thing, but for-profit companies wishing to invest into this industry don't have a strong case for avoiding regulation of some kind.
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I hope that this doesn't affect my Vonage. It was nice being able to tell qwest to kiss my ass, it would really suck to have to crawl back.
I get local, long distance, voice mail, caller ID and a ton of other features for 25.99 a month
This issue has some interesting implications. On one hand, I want to say VoIP shouldn't be regulated, as the FCC really should have no say in the internet, but were that to happen, telemarketers might find some interesting and obscure loophole allowing them to call us relentlessly, all because they'd be using VoIP phones routed through some system allowing them to contact non-VoIP phones (ala the past internet-phone company startups).
is the essence of this matter, imo. In the sense that the Net is a necessary part of any nation's infrastructure I think that the provision of Net services should be regulated and in the absence of competetive provision should be provided by government. The downside is that once the government gets its fingers in it's hard to keep them out. What we really need here is regulatory support without any regulatory repression. Rock and a hard place anyone?
Is there any reason to believe the VoIP will flourish with regulation, let alone reason to believe that it will flourish without it? The telephone industry is an institution in the US. (Try living for a month without phone access). It seems to me that for VoIP to work en masse, it will have to be somewhat backward compatible with the current system.
In short, I can see how VoIP would be cool if it worked completely free of the current phone networks, but I don't see it as practicle. In regards to this issue, I can see why it could argue that it should be regulation free, but on the other hand, I just don't foresee a market large enough to justify regulation for it. If I'm missing something, please feel free to enlighten me.
You're only as smart as your brain.
When it comes to anything other than basic crime or perhaps national defense, I just don't trust the govt anymore to secure my rights. I honestly trust technological solutions alot more than political ones. e.g. Implementing technology that makes it impossible for them to regulate voice calls without shutting down the internet. This is the way the future simply has to go, and I think our efforts and money would simply be better spent there.
if we don't get this ruling then VoIP may well be blocked by the government. Voice bits, being inately fatter than data bits, can be,literally, screened out by the simple installation of a physical filter in the cable.
KFG
If broadband Internet Telephony which doesn't touch the public switched telephone network (PSTN) is ruled as "Telecommunications", it could be very problematic for Linux distributions like RedHat, which ship software like GnomeMeeting, especially as they can be used to provide a cryptographic telecommunications system in conjunction with ssh tunneling or CIPE. Until distributors exclude such software from their distributions, software like RedHat 8.0 and Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 would be illegal in the United States.
There is the issue of universal phone access. If a large segment of the market flees the existing carriers, it will become even more uneconomical to provide service to everyone in the US. The univeral access fees would have to be increased, putting the telcos at a further price disadvantage. I don't shed any tears for the telcos, but we should apply these special tax/surcharges without regard to the transport being used (land line, cell, voip, sat phone, whatever).
A good compromise would be to levy the universal access fees on any dialable phone number (e.g. Vonage) but leave pure IP based service free (it would be difficult to inpossible to regulate anyway), and not impose any additional regulation on voip carriers.
I feel that if VoIP is regulated, this brings into play a very interesting question. Is the internet, which can be used for almost anything besides transferring actual physical objects (wouldn't that be cool!), something that can be split into different segments? To target one function of the internet, VoIP, is to invite regulation of other services. Take streaming video for example. Should that be regulated like TV? The same goes for internet radio. Where is the line drawn? This is what needs to be established. The internet is so much more complex than simple telephony, that it is impossible to only regulate one aspect of it, without taking into account the other aspects. The internet is not like airwaves; it is not like telephone lines. Why does regulation exist? Does it exist to give profit to a little clique of individuals? Or does it exist to bring order to a limited resource? The internet is by design, a non-limited resource. Theoretically, it could hold a very large volume of traffic, and deal with it fine. There is no reason, to regulate something which does not need regulating. People want it. Companies have to step up, and give them what they want. The government has no role in this aspect. If it puts the telephone companies out of business, so be it! Just like the RIAA, and the railroad companies, they will cling to their vestiges of power and control as long as they can, and this only halts technological advance and innovation. We must be on the cutting edge, or we will be left biting the dust by other countries.
As long as there is no telephone number is used in providing the service, it shouldn't be considered a Telecom service.
we can't get petitions like this for issues I'm more educated about(i.e. DMCA). I like the idea of point and click democracy.
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But do you really want VoIP telephony to remain unconnected to the POTS network? The existing telephone network is a tremendously useful infrastructure. People who dream about global networks seem to often miss the fact that we already have one. And I'm sorry, but a significant part of that tremendous public good comes from the fact that it's been regulated - particularly when you consider countries outside North America, and particularly poor ones.
Trying to keep Internet telephony away from POTS is like throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Imagine if you were asking for cell phones or marine radio phones or satphones to remain unconnected from landlines. Is there then any real point in having them? Without regulation you end up with little fiefdoms, islands of communication. "Well I met my spouse because we both had Nokias, ya see". I actually think we've only barely avoided this in the cellphone standards wars to date.
I want communication to be ubiquitous, and I want less separation of modes, not more. The history of telephony deregulation in the US and Canada is not an inspiring one. Part of the reason Internet communication has so far eluded these calls is that it's been so damn useless no one really cared. As it becomes something that affects people's lives, you're damn right democratic representation will get involved. You see the same force at work in the increasing calls for spam legislation. What is that but email regulation?
If voice over IP is regulated like analog phone, it should also have similar privacy provisions to analog phone. And if those provisions were to spread to other IP traffic (on which your right to keep secrets and not be spammed is minimal), that would be a very good thing indeed.
Of course, it might not pan out that way; I wouldn't be surprised if in fact the protection of phone calls wound up being eroded to the point emails are at now (i.e. anyone with a security interest can read you, anyone with a commercial interest can spam you).
One day the current regulatory glitch will end, and when this happens I'd much rather have everything be run like phone calls are run now than like emails are run now.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
to simply purchase wealth, thus eliminating all economic inequities in the Brave New World of the future.
KFG
I agree with the original poster.
Clearly, regular telephone service must be of very high quality. Regulation seems to be a reasonable way to guarentee the highest quality phone service and to manage the local telco monopolies from spinning out of control.
And that's why VOIP, when connected to the NA phone network and when allocated traditional phone numbers should be regulated the same way. Simply put, I have an expectation of service. In an emergency, my phone HAS to work. Post-failure lawsuits are not a satisfactory regulatory option.
On the other hand, a personal telephone system, aka "Intercom System", need not be regulated, regardless of the number of people on that system. Just as long as there is a clear understanding that these disconnected systems are not held to the same standards as a real telephone.
In other words, if I dial 911 on a telephone, I expect response. If I dial 911 on some unregulated telephone system, I should KNOW that it isn't a real telephone system.
I have a VOIP phone at work. It sucks. Poor quality, poor stability.
This is really, really important in order to prevent barriers from preventing widespread adoption of VoIP. The major telcos are highly threatened by VoIP because it effectively eliminates their revenue from long-distance calling. The idea of this initiative is to make sure that VoIP calls are treated like any other data on the internet. The telcos would love to be able to prevent you from using VoIP and somehow be able to charge money for it.
I think that slashdotters know that eventually, the technology will win the war. So, it is better to get the right technology into the right hands now.
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Aside from avoiding long distance charges and facilitating better sound quality, what's the point of voice over IP for consumers? We have a huge infrastructure in place for the faciltiation of voice over a switched telephone network that works fairly well and comes at a fairly low cost. I can reach a remote village in central
America, over the phone, but in many of those places, you'd be hard pressed to get electricity for a computer, let alone an ISP.
For carriers, there's an advantage of a unified infrastructure; any service can be provided over the same network. In that sense, the regulation issues arise; what services should be regulated, how, and why?
If the same network is being used for telephone, radio, TV, etc, what regulations apply? Frankly, does anything really need to change from a regulatory perspective? Today we have a shared network for these services (the electromagnetic spectrum); in the future, we may have a time division multiplexed packet switched network over which those services travel.
Even today, regulations of the telephone network impact data communications - you use the telephone network to connect to the Internet. You use the cable network to connect to the Internet (depending on your access method).
Why do we have regulation of these services anyway? What are the regulations that are imposed on telephone carriers?
The FCC must really think this is important to assign it a docket number this quickly. They assigned one in less then two weeks! Usually, it takes 4-6 months for them to do that!
They've also suspended their ex-parte rules insofar as comments are concerned to make it easier to file them. Be assured that I shall file comments.
your missing the point of why telecommunications was origionally, and still is, regulated.
It was regulated because the landlines had to be laid. The government granted monopolies to the companies laying cable, in exchange for their willingness to sell wholesale time on these cables. This created a government mandated monopoly that still allowed fair competition.
VoIP doesn't depend on these granted monopolised cables any more than the regular internet does (which is already regulated by the FCC because most ISP's still have to use these regulated copper and fiber cables owned by the telco). Regulating VoIP with yet another layer of restriction would be double restriction. There is already plenty of _healthy_ competition between ISPs. for these reasons, a second layer of regulation is not needed.
The only reason anybody would want to regulate VoIP the same as landline telephones is so the bells can stay in business. But in the end, we shouldn't be passing laws to keep failing, obsolete, inefficient, and humanity damaging business models afloat.
Two infinite things: your stupidity and mine. But I'm not sure about the latter. If my sig offends you, I'm sorry.
Not quite so evidently. This ENUM (e.164.in-arpa) system, would give your internet connection a 'phone number'.. which would be most useful for voip.
Im sure your government will find some way to lock it down to 'protect your freedom'. After all if it works kinda like a dynamic DNS, it will make it easier to track p2p sharers. people that do illegal shit online... 'Unpatriotic' postings.... 'dissidents' 'people that say bad things about gwb'... oh i mean 'TERRORISTS!'
1) Grab IP address.
2) do an e.164.in-arpa to get 'phone number'
3) look up in reverse directory
Cool... no need to subpoena ISP's. Heh, this is actually kinda scary...
Sure am glad I dont have 'US Freedom' no matter how hard bush tries to force it on the rest of the world...
those who control the past, control the future. those who control the present, control the past.
Slashdot has no problem with the govt. regulating MS, but when they want to regulate something slashdot users like, suddenly regulation is evil. If the govt. is allowed to regulate standard telephony, they must do the same for VoIP. Otherwise, VoIP software companies and ISPs have an unfair advantage over telephone companies. I propose deregulating telephony, rather than regulating VoIP.
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The problem with regulation is that it doesn't apply internationally very well.
Currently I have a vonage digitalvoice (which absolutely rocks btw) but I took the voice router out of the USA and plugged it into my network in scotland.
This means that I've got a US number, yet it rings in the UK. I've got unlimited calls to the USA for $40/mo.
In fact, vonage is sooo price competitive that at some times of day they beat my local telephone company for uk calls!
Regulation might make this sort of thing difficult in the future and that'd be a real shame. I look forward to the day when I can have a few different VoIP providers in different geographical locations and route my calls to the one that provides the best price.
10 days later, no phone service, so I borrowed a phone to call them. Took about 15 minutes to get thru the menu maze and the hold time. They wanted my phone number to look me up. I was told I should've remembered the number from the web site. (Why didn't the web site say so?) I growled at them until they tried to look me up by address. Couldn't find anything. Very unhappy about the prospect of another 6 day wait, I suggested I could just sign up again. They said I shouldn't because if I was in their system, why, I'd get billed twice. Ok, I know the quality of help from support lines and such can be abysmal. Perhaps if I'd called back I would've got someone more competent.
Back to square one. You can get a cell phone the day you walk into a store, but I don't want one. Instead, I tried to hunt down the telco's competition. There were a few other local phone providers but none of them did residences. Finally hit on VoIP. (I'd gotten cable modem set up in a mere 2 days.) Took less than 10 minutes to sign up and start using it. But, I never successfully received a call, so I cancelled that part of the service. Would be nice if friends and family could call, but I can live with the arrangement I've got and hope reception of calls is put in working order soon.
It can be fun messing with officious people who want your phone number. So far, I haven't been refused any service.
Officious person, pointing to line on a form: "You forgot to fill in your phone number"
Me: "No, I didn't forget"
Officious person: "We have to have a phone number."
(At this point I could say "no you don't" or "why?" if I feel like playing some more, but I usually skip it because who wants to hang around in a dreary bureaucratic setting all day?)
Me: "I don't have one"
Officious person: "uh, well can you give us some other number like your work number?"
Me: "Ok, 555-5555"
Officious person: "um, no, we can't use that number. Is there some number we can reach you just in case there's some problem?"
Yeah, right! Liars. They just want to harass me with telemarketing. About then I turn to the exit and this finally convinces the form police that they don't need a number after all.
I suppose I could've saved time by putting down, oh, Gray Davis's phone number, which I doubt they'd recognize. It's amusing watching the expressions on their faces. First is a weary pained look because I'm "one of those". I'm making their life more difficult by refusing to give out the number I must surely have, because everyone has a phone, right? Then amazement that I actually might not have a number, just like I told them. Then it's a mix of contempt and pity because they're thinking I might be a dirt poor deadbeat who doesn't pay phone bills (maybe I'm homeless!), and finally bafflement because I don't look the part.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
I can't say how this works for your telco, however in the telco I work for (a reasonably large canadian telco) it is not actually the telco's choice, but is actually the way the CRTC (canadian equivlant to the FCC) regulates it. you see when you get your local phone service from a CLEC (competitive local exchange carrier) your phone line is physically disconnected from our equipment and hooked up the the CLEC's equipment within the phone exchange, on top of that (as per CRTC regulation) we are not allowed to touch that phone line without permission from the CLEC (we can't disconnect it, we can't move it, we can't put other equipment in line with it (ie. ADSL) the phone line is leased to the CLEC and we can't touch it. so now if you want ADSL the only company that can LEGALLY give you that service is your local provider (or someone who is re-selling that service, (in the case you mentioned Yahoo! is just re-selling SBC DSL service)) in our case, as far as I know, none of our CLECs currently offer ADSL, however I know one of them has been thinking about it, and we may see it soon.
This does pose other problems as well, for example if you order service from a CLEC, and then move out of your house we can't legally provide the next occupant of the house service untill the CLEC decides to release the line (which they are often pretty slow at doing) (ok, legally we can provide service, however we would have to run a brand new line to the house. even though there is a line that we maintain that isn't in use... or in english it's a big mess)
This is a very good point.
:-) that my dedicated VoIP phone of the future will be able to talk to the internet, my computer, PDA or mobile and obtain a list of allowed callers and only let certain numbers though (and give other users voicemail). While this is possible at present with Caller ID and PC software I hope it will be standard in "the world of tomorrow!".
:)).
I'm included to think that commercial provision to companies and end users of such a service should require regulation to protect consumers against fraudulent and inexcusably poor quality providers (who will be both individuals and other companies).
This could even be part of a larger consumer rights act governing the way companies do business on line, with specific clauses and amendments for particular industries such as telecoms regulation (though such an act would have be be at Federal level in the USA and at European Union level Europe in order for it be effective and not suffer from regional loopholes).
(While of course I appreciate the internet is global much online business is conducted within national or eurozone boundaries which is why it would be worth investing time in such a bill.)
However...I'd like to think (and this is possibly just wishful thinking
*Really* neat features would be:
- Ability to check for black listed caller ID's in real time (ala MAPS/ORBS (only without Alan Brown
- Ability to take a number, connect to something like the W3C's vision of a Semantic Web and search and find a match for the the number - and so obtain the nature - of the business calling.
This way you could only let certain types of companies through, while blocking others - i.e. always block banks and credit card companies, apart from my own bank and credit card company and always block companies like double glazing firms (unless I've said I'm expecting a call back from a particular company).
If the caller was of "unknown" origin I'd like to be able to leave a brief recorded message telling them that if this is not an unsolicited call from a commercial entity to say 'leave a message' to leave a message on voicemail and I'll call you back (and warning them that if this was a commercial unsolicited call I'd prosecute the company who left the message).