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

Here's a link

[Sir Haxalot]

to the same story on ZDNet.

Operator license = fees and taxes

[r_glen]

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

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 )

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.

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.

Just wait for the Taxinator to get in office...

[warpSpeed]

When Arrrnold gets in office, this will all get taken care of :-)

*ducks, and runs for life...*

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.

Vonage is NOT P2P

[justMichael]

With Vonage you can call ANY phone number you want, not just some other VoIP phone.

And you don't get a "handset" you get a Cisco ATA186 that you plug any phone you want into.

It talks to their servers becasue at some point it has to get injected back into the POTS network as an analog call.

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?

Re:Not Just California though

[Oliver Wendell Jones]

it's OK when it stops you, but God forbid it ever touch me! Fairly hypocritical.

Well, duh... Are you new to Slashdot?

Simple Rules:
1) If its good for ME then it's good for EVERYBODY
2) If its bad for ME then its bad for EVERYBODY
3) If its bad for (MICROSOFT|RIAA|MPAA|SCO) then its good for EVERYBODY
4) If its bad for LINUX then its bad for EVERYBODY
5) If it involves Natalie Portman, Beowulf Clusters or Pants Full of Hot Grits then its good for EVERYBODY
6)If it involves the GOATSE guy its bad for EVERYBODY.

Did I miss any?

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.