California Demands Licensure For VoIP Providers

muonzoo writes "Looks like California will be wrangling up the VoIP companies and mowing them down. Or, at least licensing them. CNET has a story about state legislators' push for all VoIP companies in the state to carry a Telephone Operator License. CNET also has a quick blurb about Vonage and how they have recently started charging customers a 'Regulatory Recovery Fee.' Ugly stuff for a young industry." Here's our earlier post about Vonage charging the regulatory recovery fee.

Comments

Operator license = fees and taxes

[r_glen]

Yet another not-so-subtle attempt at increasing state revenue.
Stay away from my internet, dammit!

Re:Internal VoIP Included?

[Quarters]

Do you have to pay any telephone operator regulatory charges now?

Do you sell your VoIP services to end users?

If you answered yes to either/both of those, then you probably are affected. If you're not a VoIP provider then I doubt you have anything to worry about.

I don't see this as as big a deal as the submittor of the article does. If a company is a telephone provider, regardless of the trasmission mechanism used, then they should have to play using the same set of rules/regulations as the other telephone providers.

Triple Bullshit on you

[muckdog]

You are already paying tax and regulatory fees for your cable and DSL lines. Why should you have to pay them again for VoIP?

As I've said before...

[IPFreely]

It's not about carrying voice traffic over TCP/IP, though that is what the name implies. What these VOIP companies are doing is tying their internet operations into local REAL telephone connections. They are using normal, dialable 7/10 digit numbers to identify destinations, and they are crossing traffic over between internet and telephone networks.

AOL Talk, MS Netmeeting, heck even Battlecom allow you to carry voice over IP. But the difference is you can't dial up you phone number from Battlecom and make your phone ring.

The VOIP in these cases are companies that tie into real telephone networks. They issue real telephone numbers to their customers. You can use a normal telephone to reach them. That means they are regulatable by the same standards as normal telephone. The regulators own the address space, not just the service standards.

The easiest way to avoid this regulation and fees is not to tie into the telephone network, don't use the same 7/10 digit address space and don't claim you can call normal telephones. You do that and there's no fees and no regulation.