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

Internal VoIP Included?

[nurb432]

What if i do VoIP totally inside my company. does this sort of garbage effect me as well?

what about software suppliers.. ( both commercial and OSS )

etc etc.

( and no i didnt read it.. link didnt come up here )

Bullshit

[eln]

Just because VoIP involves voice, that does NOT mean it's the same as telephone service. The monopolistic nature of telephone service (only one company can realistically have lines in a given area, particularly in the "last mile") makes heavy regulation and regulatory fees necessary. VoIP does not suffer from this physical limitation to competition, and thus any number of VoIP providers can exist in any area. This is yet another blatant attempt of government to cash in on an emerging technology.

Voice IM?

[moehoward]

What about things like Voice IM? The standards for defining telephony are pretty loose. I talk to people (video conference, voice chat...) over IM all the time via Yahoo and Windows Messenger.

Seems odd to single it out because the lines already exist. I thought that the phone companies were regulated in large part because of the necessity of having only one line per house, rather than 20 providers digging up your town.

Don't most people already pay these access charges in one way or another via ISPs or other downstream providers.

I suspect that the politicians are much more stupid than we assumed. And I mean that.