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Vonage Fights Minnesota's Attempts To Regulate VoIP
rmccoy writes "Vonage said Thursday it intends to fight the first-ever decision by a U.S. state to regulate companies that provide Internet-based phone services. Minnesota's Public Utilities Commission unanimously decided two weeks ago that the New Jersey-based voice over IP (VoIP) provider is subject to the rules and regulations that cover traditional phone companies."
Seeing how they're dealing with interstate communication.
When regulations there to protect the consumer do nothing at all to stop the one single incumbent provider but effectively eviscerate anyone attempting to provide the consumers choice or innovation?
I hate american "capitalism". (If for some reason you want to call it that)
I mean, this isn't about just "voice over internet".... it's about a phone service that happens to use the net.
So... either they should have to follow regulations like any other phone company..... OR... the phone companies should be released from their regulatory obligations, at least with respect to the voip providers, so they can operate on equal footing.
This seems fair. They are providing phone service that connects with the regular phone network, so why shouldn't they be treated like a traditional phone company?
While VoIP (or at least, VoIP-connected-to-the-standard-telco-system) is pretty much the same as normal phone service, trying to apply exactly the same regulations isn't going to work.
For example, phone companies are supposed to track where phone calls originate (for 911 dispatchers, for example). That's not going to be possible with VoIP.
There should certainly be some sort of regulations, but simply saying "it's phone service, the same rules apply" is dumb.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
Governments (pretty much all of them) seem to be completely out of the loop and out of control when it comes to technology. Good decisions sometimes get made, but too often it seems they're just throwing darts at a dartboard, completely missing it and assuming that means Ban it or Tax it or Regulate it. And even if you like the idea of regulation for whatever it is, they always try to apply old rules to new things.
In this case, they're trying to treat VoIP as...a regular telephone. Charging them for the 911 setup? What? You want them to be a telecom and pay nebulous telecom fees, ok...why do these fees even exist? By the day I am feeling more and more lost in my own country. Or maybe it's just the world, no one seems to do it significantly better. on any kind of a regular basis.
This nation likes to call itself capitalist, but to me it just looks like a huge pile or regulation, largely designed to create monopolys but not really regulate them - combined with a ton of subsidies, kickbacks, whatever to already large buisiness interests that are also exceedingly anti-capitalist.
Ok to uh, keep on topic, this is ridiculous. VoIP is not the telephone. And why is this Minnesotas decision to make, shouldn't this be at a federal level? Seems like telephony has a pretty large interstate component.
From the Vonage web site "Vonage is proud to offer 911 dialing. When you dial 911, your call is routed from the Vonage Digital Voice network to your local emergency service dispatcher."
In instances where a company is offering Internet based services that both compete and replace traditional services, it makes sense that such a service would be subject to the same regulatory control as the competition. In this specific case, if you replace your residential phone service with Vonage VoIP service, it seems both reasonable and a matter of public safety that a call made to 911 from your residential phone connect you to local emergency services. As a valuable community service, 911 is funded by fees charged to local phone companies. It seems unreasonable for Vonage to escape paying 911 and related fees that it's regulated competitors can't avoid paying.
Minnesota's Public Utilities Commission does not seem to be overreaching in this case.
Where things get tricky are services that don't outright replace residential or business phone services, but offer a quasi-phone service such as the voice services now being offered as part of some instant message services. At what point do these unregulated services cross the line where they become subject to local public utility commission regulations.
I mean, this isn't about just "voice over internet".... it's about a phone service that happens to use the net.
... even more ineffecient than government and arguably more ineffecient than communism itself).
So... either they should have to follow regulations like any other phone company..... OR... the phone companies should be released from their regulatory obligations, at least with respect to the voip providers, so they can operate on equal footing.
You ignore a fundamental difference. Local telcos own a monopoly over the local copper cable running to people's homes. As a monopoly they must be regulated, nationalized into a public works, or we are left with a monopoly market running amock (remember, monopoly markets are the least effecient
There is a huge difference between a company that essentially offers a software (or firmware) service over the internet that happens to transmit and receive electrically encoded voice data, and one which owns the local DSLAMS, the local copper running into your home, and can leverage that local infrastructure monopoly in an anticompetative manner if they are not regulated.
The idea that the regulations designed to hold a local telco monopoly in check should apply to a competely unrelated business that provides what is essentially a software service via an entirely different infrastructure (one that entails no monopoly, at that) is ludricous.
One hopes the law is written such that (a) this is a federal, not a state matter and (b) such that telco's are targeted, and broader software services are not.
Otherwise you'll see AIM, MSN Messenger, Jabber, and other services targeted the moment they can provide audio and video conferencing, and seamless communication with old POTS phones.
And that would really chill innovation, as much as any Microsoft monopoly could ever dream of.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Ending up with a situation where some packets sent over IP are taxed - specifically in this case a subset of packets containing vocal audio - can only lead to a situation where every single packet needs to be audited simply in order to track and log the taxable ones. That's horrendous enough - and so expensive to implement that even aside from the privacy implications it would cost much more than any revenues raised.
But consider, what's the difference between a packet of "telephone" voice and a packet of "Internet radio" voice? What's the difference between an Internet radio monolog and a conference call in which one party is doing all the talking? If two people listen live to each others' Internet radio shows, and converse thereby, is it telephony for purposes of taxation? If so, then when is Net radio not a phone call?
The only sane conclusion is: Vocal conversation over the Net may look like a phone call, but it's really something else. It may also look like radio, but it's really something else. Making Internet "phone" companies license themselves as real phone companies do makes no more sense than requiring a broadcast license of Net radio stations.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
Vonage mentions they are The Broadband Phone Company on their web page. If you are a phone company then you have to pay into the 911 kitty for that state. If the local phone companies pay for it, you better believe they will hit up those that don't. Vonage offers a 911 that calls the local police dept. Of course you don't get the address and it bypasses the states paid for official 911 service.
Competitors like Packet8 don't offer 911 service and stay away from calling themselves a phone company.
Clearly tho the agenda of the PUC's in PA and MN is to squash VoIP since it is a real threat. Kill it now before it gets to be a monster they cannot regulate and kill.
Hedley
VoIP doens't mean "Any voice service on the internet". VoIP is a specific set of protocols for providing integration with the telephone system via IP.
What Vonage offers is a box that you plug a telephone into, get a real telephone number, and make real telephone calls to and from. It is no more or less a telephone than the telephone you use in your house hooked up to your phone company.. the only difference is the backhaul.
So.. rather than saying "Should vonage be regulated"... the question should be "What is different about Vonage that they should not be bound by the regulation the phone company is? Could the phone company start giving you a cisco VOIP box, a DSL line, and thereby avoid regulation? You bet they can't, cause they are the phone company.. why should Vonage be able to offer something the phone company cannot legally offer?
It's minnesota's decision to make because Vonage is offering phone service to Minnesotans.
That's what the INCOME taxes are for. Both Vonage and its customers pay income taxes. There's not need to add fees associated specifically with land-line carriers to a Vonage bill.
It may have been said here or not, sometimes I don't feel like sorting through the FP's and other trollings.
Wouldn't this be a case of double dipping by the telco's being that they're charging you for bandwidth usage, along with an added cost to using VoIP?
Another thing I would like to point out, is telco's have deep ass pockets, as most of us know. Don't be fooled by their rants on not having enough money for yadda yadda, or being monopolized because it's political propaganda. Telco's who need laws passed often spend enormous amounts of money lobbying politicians to get them to pass these measures. It's definitely about time people got together and lobbied against this type of bs. Is everyone going to wait until the last second until everything is being regulated under some 3rd world like rules that make no sense.
MoFscker
If the government starts getting their fingers in this business that is doing just fine competitively, you can bet that I'll start to see loads of fees and taxes being added onto my bill, turning my $27.00 monthly bill into something more like $40.00. And for what benefits? None.
Actually, there are benefits, at least for some of it. We need to pay somehow for 911 service, service for schools, libraries, hospitals, the deaf. (I won't attempt to defend the massive subsidies for service to people who choose to live in the boondocks, including the entire population of the State of Alaska, or the replacement profits to compensate local telcos for the loss of the LD gravy.) The problem is, those things should just be paid for out of general revenues (income taxes, etc.). But politicians who pander to the "get rid of taxes" yahoos look for ways to hide the taxes somewhere else, and this is what we get. (No disrespect for Yahoo!, Inc. intended, but they knew the word meant "boorish, crass, or stupid person" when they adopted it as their corporate name.)
I think the problem is that the phone companies are actually offering two things: the physical network infrastructure, and phone service. The regulations for both are intertwined since they have historically been equivalent, but now one can be offered without the other. Minnesota is trying to apply their combined regulations to a company that is only offering the phone service, and that is just dumb. So we agree that Minnesota's decision is dumb. What is really needed is for separate regulations to apply for phone service and network providers. Traditional phone companies should be subject to both, and Vonage should be subject only to the phone service ones. Also, we agree that existing phone service regulations are probably impractical in a world where phone service is provided over the Internet and they probably need changing (perhaps to the point of abolishing them entirely).
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How about the point where they interconnect and exchange calls with the POTS network?
Talk only to other net phones, you're a net application. Interconnect net calls with POTS calls as a service to your customers and you're a phone company.
And when I say "as a service to your customers" I'm making a distinction:
If you're selling connectivity to the POTS network to general customers, suitable for replacing local phone service, you're a telco - whether you're doing it over copper, fiber, "cellphone" packet, 802.*, infrared, wires-through-wormholes, or what-have-you.
If you're selling a PBX replacement, hooking up a customer to his own lines for which he's ALREADY paying off a telco and the telco's tax man, you're an equipment/software vendor.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Just to point out that most people with phone-service in "the boondocks" are rural, and most of those people are involved with providing the rest of us leeches with our food. If they all move away from "the boondocks", we starve.
Not good.
peter
I am already double taxed. This would be triple taxing. I pay a Universal Service fee to both Verizon (my local phone company) and SpeakEasy (my ISP).
-- Don't Tase me, bro!