Slashdot Mirror
Federal Court Throws Out Minnesota VoIP Regulation
An anonymous reader submits: "Voxilla reports that the FCC will announce Friday that 'a federal court has issued a permanent injunction against a recent ruling by the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission to regulate Voice over IP provider Vonage as a telephone company.'
This is a significant move towards stopping recent movement by states to regulate VoIP -- most notably, California vs. VoicePulse and Wisconsin vs. Packet8."
To Whom It May Concern (other than myself):
Hi. I have been a huge fan of cereals of all kinds for my whole life. Sometimes I eat it for all three meals of the day, or live on it exclusively for weeks, or put it in my underpants to keep me feeling fresh (and also as an emergency back-up snack). I cereasly love it.
I am especially fond of a lot of your cereals like Boo Berry and Trix and Chex and Lucky Charms and Cookie Crisp. My absolute favorite is Fruity Pebbles though, which I believe is a Post cereal. Maybe you guys should make something that tastes like Fruity Pebbles except manages not to have Fred Flintstone's ugly mug all over the box. Yabba Dabba Eww. Anyway, my point is that I like a lot of your cereals and so I am personally concerned with their condition. And, quite frankly, lately I've been a bit worried.
Let's start with my favorite cereal of yours - Boo Berry. I love Boo Berry... at least I think I do... actually, I know it used to be my favorite cereal but I haven't had any in years so I've kind of forgotten what it tastes like - because it's not in any stores! No stores in my area carry it. I checked on your website and apparently you still make it; you even offer it for sale. Unfortunately I can't justify buying it for the $6.74 for a twelve ounce box price. You do offer buying it in a case instead of a four pack, which would drop the price to $4.71 a box, but that is still unreasonable and would also require me to spend an entire week's pay on a large shipment of haunted cereal. My girlfriend would kill me (if I didn't overdose on blue food coloring first).
I think I have a solution to this dilemma. I know you can't force any businesses to carry your cereals and I know that you can't afford to sell them direct for less than $4.71 and still have money left over to pay for upkeep on Count Chocula's castle, hiring someone to build 400 mind-numbing advertisements disguised as crappy kids games for youruleschool.com, and keep your CEOs rolling in golden Kix. So here's what you should do - open up your own stores all across the country. You've already got one in Mall-of-America, now put one in every mall in America. Even if you don't sell much cereal (and you'd sell a lot, trust me) it would be great advertising. You can sell t-shirts with nifty slogans like "Frosted Wheaties: When You're Too Damn Lazy To Put Sugar On Your Own Wheaties!" or "Honey Nut Chex: It Rhymes With 'Funny Butt Sex' For A Reason!" and other stuff which is even more great advertising plus it makes money up front. I can see it now, picture a young child in the mall with its mother...
YOUNG CHILD: Mommy! Mommy! Look at all the pretty colored cereal!
MOTHER: Oh Honey, you know cereals like that are just a result of the global dentist/cereal/porn conspiracy, we've been through this a million times...
YOUNG CHILD: Awww...
MAN IN TRIX RABBIT SUIT comes out of the store.
MAN IN TRIX RABBIT SUIT: You know Ms. Averagemother, all of our cereals are fortified with titanium plating and deflector shi... er, essential vitamins and minerals; and they are a part of this complete breakfast.
MAN IN TRIX RABBIT SUIT whips out a complete breakfast on a tray.
MOTHER: Well... I guess a few minutes couldn't hurt...
YOUNG CHILD: Gee, thanks mom!
YOUNG CHILD runs in followed slowly by MOTHER. Group of scantily clad dentists appears and drags MOTHER into back room. YOUNG CHILD transforms into a cartoon and spends eternity trying to steal Lucky's Charms and torturing the Trix Rabbit by hogging the cereal.
Now, on to my next suggestion. You need to do something about Cheerios. Really, they're awful. Yes they are good for my heart, but this is overshadowed by the fact that they taste like my butt.
On the other hand, a cereal that already tastes great is Lu
post!
phones are evil.
"Sanity is not statistical", George Orwell, "1984"
You guys over there need to start taking up your arms against stupid laws.
Get your own free personal location tracker
On our assumptions, an important property of these three types of EC suffices to account for the strong generative capacity of the theory. This suggests that the earlier discussion of deviance is to be regarded as problems of phonemic and morphological analysis. Let us continue to suppose that the appearance of parasitic gaps in domains relatively inaccessible to ordinary extraction is not to be considered in determining a parasitic gap construction. It follows that this selectionally introduced contextual feature is rather different from the system of base rules exclusive of the lexicon. In the discussion of resumptive pronouns following, the fundamental error of regarding functional notions as categorial is necessary to impose an interpretation on nondistinctness in the sense of distinctive feature theory.
It must be emphasized, once again, that the theory of syntactic features developed earlier is necessary to impose an interpretation on the levels of acceptability from fairly high to virtual gibberish. Suppose, for instance, that a case of semigrammaticalness of a different sort is, apparently, determined by the traditional practice of grammarians. Comparing these examples with their parasitic gap counterparts in (96) and (97), we see that the speaker-hearer's linguistic intuition does not readily tolerate an abstract underlying order. For one thing, any associated supporting element may remedy and, at the same time, eliminate a corpus of utterance tokens upon which conformity has been defined by the paired utterance test. For any transformation which is sufficiently diversified in application to be of any interest, this analysis of a formative as a pair of sets of features is unspecified with respect to the ultimate standard that determines the accuracy of any proposed grammar.
"Orthodoxy means not thinking--not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness." --Eric Blair
What is the fundamental difference between a traditional telephone company and purely VoIP-based companies? VoIP is slowly making it's way into traditional phone companies, does this make them less of a phone company?
I'd say the difference is quite minimal for the end user.
I'm just rambling, but I'd sure like to hear my fellow Slashdotters' thoughts.
.: Max Romantschuk
"Total Phonecall!"
"Your connection has been terminated!"
"I'll call you back"
"Hasta la vista, baby bell"
Why should there be any more regulation when the very data can be captured easily?
and, on a related note, will Microsoft be compelled to register as a bank? People use their technology to do online banking you see...
-
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
At first I thought its a nice thing that courts and lawmakers at least partially seem to understand that the internet is different from conventional channels, with some hope that in the future they would also understand that software is different from other arts. Then I realized that all this could be merely because there aren't any uber-corporations interested brib^W lobbying politicians to tax the internet the way they do for software patents, ridiculous copyright laws etc.
You mean instead of suing the competition into oblivion they will have to provide customers with a reason to part with their hard earned dollars?!
This is America, it's our God given right to make money from nothing, you commies!
</SARCASM>
-A
My 73 yo father switched to broadband (10 Mbit/sec), voip, etc some two years ago. He surfs, reads the news, etc. He also pays all his bills via the net and is fighting hard to get me do it too - "Come on, it's really easy", he says. Not only that, know he wants me to install Linux on his machine so "he can see what all the fuzz is about". No, he never had a technical diploma of any sort.
Now, he bugs me with his fancy new voip connection. But, I am sure he never lobbied in Minnesota for their decision.
Vonage had maintained that it does not provide telephone service. Instead, lawyers for Vonage contended, the company offers data services over the internet
Where does this put VoIP with regards to telemarketers? If it's a data service, the FTC no-call list can't be applied, can it? Does this mean a call from a telemarketer to a VoIP-phone could be classified as spam?
I live in the a top 50 city for size and there is NO voip service here. Hundreds and hundreds of area codes, and they can't even bother with a top 50 city. WTF, assholes. Money magazine even named this the number one city to move to. Somebody needs to tell that to the telecomm companies.
voting systems, stock markup FraUDs, etc....
computers:
the fcc has warned that this device may contain softwar nazi kode stolen buy phonIE corepirate nazi felons. use may cause immeasurable embarrassmeNT, & likely bankruptcIE.
polling booth:
please be advised that most of the fauxking 'candidates' either have outstanding felonIE/grand larcenIE charges, or are associated with/sponsored buy, those who do.
stock markup:
contributions to this pyramid scheme have been proven to be used as a method to reduce your choices, &/or to hold your hardearned resources hostage, prior to stealing them.
the lights are coming up now. lookout bullow.
consult with/trust in yOUR creator... that's the spirit, moving you.
all your phones are belong to us!
-- troutsoup.com
What I'm afraid of is politicians that don't understand voip. Knowing them, they'll probably apply a tax to help regular phone companies "remain competitive". They'll then limit this technology, perhaps when the lobbyists demand it, perhaps when they decide that it's a threat to homeland security. Or, the phone companies could sue for some reason- unfair competition? copyright infringement? and kill it that way. I hate to be cynical like this, but politicians are just that way.
"73% of quotes on the Internet are made up" -Ben Franklin
Foundations are in place for martial law in the US
... this department and others have repeatedly raised serious policy and legal objections to an 'emergency czar' role for FEMA
By Ritt Goldstein
July 27 2002
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/07/27/10 274974 18339.html
Recent pronouncements from the Bush Administration and national security initiatives put in place in the Reagan era could see internment camps and martial law in the United States.
When president Ronald Reagan was considering invading Nicaragua he issued a series of executive orders that provided the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) with broad powers in the event of a "crisis" such as "violent and widespread internal dissent or national opposition against a US military invasion abroad". They were never used.
But with the looming possibility of a US invasion of Iraq, recent pronouncements by President George Bush's domestic security chief, Tom Ridge, and an official with the US Civil Rights Commission should fire concerns that these powers could be employed or a de facto drift into their deployment could occur.
On July 20 the Detroit Free Press ran a story entitled "Arabs in US could be held, official warns". The story referred to a member of the US Civil Rights Commission who foresaw the possibility of internment camps for Arab Americans. FEMA has practised for such an occasion.
FEMA, whose main role is disaster response, is also responsible for handling US domestic unrest.
From 1982-84 Colonel Oliver North assisted FEMA in drafting its civil defence preparations. Details of these plans emerged during the 1987 Iran-Contra scandal.
They included executive orders providing for suspension of the constitution, the imposition of martial law, internment camps, and the turning over of government to the president and FEMA.
A Miami Herald article on July 5, 1987, reported that the former FEMA director Louis Guiffrida's deputy, John Brinkerhoff, handled the martial law portion of the planning. The plan was said to be similar to one Mr Giuffrida had developed earlier to combat "a national uprising by black militants". It provided for the detention "of at least 21 million American Negroes" in "assembly centres or relocation camps".
Today Mr Brinkerhoff is with the highly influential Anser Institute for Homeland Security. Following a request by the Pentagon in January that the US military be allowed the option of deploying troops on American streets, the institute in February published a paper by Mr Brinkerhoff arguing the legality of this.
He alleged that the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which has long been accepted as prohibiting such deployments, had simply been misunderstood and misapplied.
The preface to the article also provided the revelation that the national plan he had worked on, under Mr Giuffrida, was "approved by Reagan, and actions were taken to implement it".
By April, the US military had created a Northern Command to aid Homeland defence. Reuters reported that the command is "mainly expected to play a supporting role to local authorities".
However, Mr Ridge, the Director of Homeland Security, has just advocated a review of US law regarding the use of the military for law enforcement duties.
Disturbingly, the full facts and final contents of Mr Reagan's national plan remain uncertain. This is in part because President Bush took the unusual step of sealing the Reagan presidential papers last November. However, many of the key figures of the Reagan era are part of the present administration, including John Poindexter, to whom Oliver North later reported.
At the time of the Reagan initiatives, the then attorney-general, William French Smith, wrote to the national security adviser, Robert McFarlane: "I believe that the role assigned to the Federal Emergency Management Agency in the revised Executive Order exceeds its proper function as a co-ordinating agency for emergency preparedness
As someone who works in this industry, I thought I'd share some of the future of telecomm for those who aren't 'in the know'. All communication lines going to any endpoint (home, business, sensors, etc) are quickly moving to an IP based data network. Unfortunately, there are two problems that governments and current telephone companies face:
:-)
1) Roughly 50% of their voice revenue stream comes from per minute connection charges, other carrier access charges, & regulation charges (govn't). These will evaporate when subscribers move to data driven VoIP (ie: you pay a flat fee for DSL or cable modem bandwidth now, and it can run all your voice calls to anywhere in the world). Eventually the PSTN connection part will no longer be necessary, so Vonage will disappear as we know it today, but it has finally woken up the telcos to what the future will bring.
2) Pretty much the other half of their revenue stream comes from the 'premium' voice feature services (call waiting, text messaging, etc), all of which are quickly moving from the class 5 switch into the phones themselves (aka: free).
What do you do when your primary revenue stream evaporates? Fight it in the courts or with govn't officials. Remember, govn'ts have been taking a nice chunk of that revenue for themselves as well.
We will have to move to a bandwidth & quality of service (QoS) based payment style. A minimum bandwidth is given for a flat rate (which will include -all- voice), and extra bandwidth will be provided on demand at an agreed QoS. The higher the bandwidth & QoS, the higher the fee.
Things to watch out for: VoIP everywhere, SIP phones/services, VoWLAN, current voice carriers moving their infrastructure to their IP networks, and govn't regulations dictating that comm lines (called data services & unregulated) become regulated for QoS.
The companies that move to this model last will not survive. They aren't going to like this.
OK, don't get me wrong, i'm not disagreeing with this ruling. Where do you draw the line, though?
Do you tax the providers who provide a circuit switched network, but not those who use a packet switched network? (as seems to be the case here, never mind that a lot of phone companies use ATM/AAL1 on the backhaul anyhow)
Do you tax a provider who provides you with a physical FXS connection, but not a provider who lets you make calls by some other method? (e.g. h.323 to a peering point which connects to a bunch of DS1s)
Do you only tax the incumbents, because their lines are running through public space and were paid for with public money? (this one almost makes sense)
Where do you draw the line?
You're doing it wrong.
What you are talking about is very interesting, but I wonder what would happen if the the following four circumstances occur (and yes, I know it could be a long shot idea):
1) A few of the VoIPs get bought out or shareholder owned/staked-out by major cable companies.
2) VoIPs adopts a universal/national standard as a result of a consotium of these companies huddling together "looking for interoperability."
3) a major cable provider offers/advertises this standardized VoIP service "free with their broadband service."
4) other big name cable providers jump on the bandwagon.
If the above four occur, then (IMO) you will soon see VoIPs using a universal standard most of the time for Jane/Joe-User.
Now we all know cable and telcos are regulated. But most important to my analogy here, cel-phone companies are built to use a service you already explicitly pay for (traditional telco lines/services), and they are also regulated.
So, if VoIP adopts a standard protocol and it gets adopted by the major telco/cable companies, then I see the door wide open for states (and more importantly the feds) to regulate/tax individual VoIP companies in much the same way as cellular companies get taxed today.
But then again, I could be high on my drug-of-choice.
.
uR iGn0ranc3, Their Power
...if I didn't have to depend on my local phone company for a DSL line in the first place :(
I've said a couple of times before that the federal tax that we pay for landline and cellphones was originally a temporary measure in 1898 to finance the Spanish-American War.
VOIP is an opportunity to get out from under all of this stupid infrastructure. Even without 911 service, I am all for it.
While I'm glad that the MPUC's decision was thrown out, I don't think we know whether or not this is really good or just a speed bump for the MPUC (and by extension all other PUCs).
The problem is that we don't have the actual court ruling. We know that the court issued a permanant injunction agains the MPUC's ruling, but we don't know why. We don't know if it's been thrown out for procedural problems. If so, then MPUC simply corrects that procedural problem, makes a slightly different ruling that has the same effect. But if the ruling agrees with the VoIP providers as to what they're offering and why it's fundamentally different than what the LECs offer, then it sets a strong precedent and it impacts every PUC in the US.
Unfortunately, we don't know yet. And we won't know until the ruling is released on Oct 10. So while I'm cautiously optimistic, that's just me being hopeful. It's not reflective of any evidence.
Key to financial independence: Spend less than you earn. Save and invest the difference. Do it for a long time.
ah, but you don't need your local company to provide dsl (well, you might depending on your area) all you need is their wires.. but check with other ISP's in the area. For instance, in quite a bit of NY state, Logical Net provides DSL service, and they simply use verizon's (or your local bell's) wiring (for a meager fee) and boom, you have lovely DSL, without even talking to your all powerful bellco Then, there's Roadrunner, and other cable modems, as you all know, but if you can't get ANY other high speed, there's always sattelite. (and if you can't get that, you should probally move somewhere that has power.
<Soapbox>
Any way about it, I have vonage, and it's a Wonderful thing.. it's cheaper than any other phone company.. (oops, did I say that?) umm.. base station land line telecommunications service, (IP or otherwise) you can hook up regular phones, answering machines, fax machines, anything with a phone jack! (non-vonage sponsored faq, and cheap plug for referrals) Not to mention you can keep your regular phone number, equipment, etc.. (FYI, if you use a refferal, you get an extra month free, instead of going directly to vonage :) Where else can you get a true to life 800 number for a couple extra bux a month?
</Soapbox>
ok.. I'm done now..
(yeah, I know, you already knew most of that anwyays...)
LostboyTNT MercyHosting.Com
Server-Status.Com
50Bux.Com
TLDR.Com
CNET has an article that is much more detailed than the voxilla article. This latter article makes me even more hopeful that the court's ruling is going in the direction that I'm hoping it will go.
Key to financial independence: Spend less than you earn. Save and invest the difference. Do it for a long time.
How long till the annoucement from the Baby Bells that they are all going voice over IP to avoid regulation?
1. Have regional monolopy with 2 token "competiors"
2. Change business model to become unregulated.
3. More Profits by reduced costs!
Has anyone else noticed that the latest MCI commercials on TV have a closed caption script that's completely different than the voice & video portions of the commercial?
The cc portion is pushing a VOIP company (can't recall the name) which is probably owned by MCI, while the voice & video portions are pushing MCI's latest calling plan. I find it interesting that one commercial appears to be pushing two completely different services.
I've seen two different versions of it too, so it appears not to be an error.
Help find a cure for Gidget.
IANAL, but if non-profit organizations are exempt from this law, then that necessarily includes credit unions, which are non-profit financial institutions run solely for the benefit of their membership. If credit unions as part of the non-profit community, are exempt from this law, then banks can claim unfair competition. Of course the law could exempt all non-profit organizations except credit unions, however that seems to be an option legislators are unhappy with. So, banks get the exemption too.
Remember the urban legend crap emails about "Congress is going to start taxing email!!!" Well for the same reason email can't be taxed, this can't be taxed. Let's suppose someone with a VOIP phone calls someone else with a VOIP phone. They are communicating entirely over the internet with no use of any telephone wires. That is almost exactly the same as a voice chat session over AIM, Yahoo IM, etc. except for different software. Congress has already passed a law that they will not tax any communication over the internet.(online purchase is something else entirely) Now they sure as Hell aren't going to tax IM services as phone companies, so they had better not tax VOIP, either.
With the capability of VOIP to connect to regular telephones, that is a capability that they are paying the phone companies for. When it gets onto telephone wires at the receiving end, that is already being paid for, taxed, regulated, etc. by the receiver of the call.
We may experience some slight turbulence and then...explode. -Capt. Mal Reynolds
I am sure you will feel that way when you fall, or get hurt. 911 is required. and thats what the whole MN PUC issue started as, vontage does not offer E911 service as required by minnesota law on all tellephone lines that are in use in the state.
/., but 911 is required. If VoIP to PSTN service is ever to go mainstream it has to worrk. Otherwise your 70 year old dad is going to buy it and when he is haveing a heart attack and tries to dial 911 and it will not work properly.
/. is news for nerds, not news for telco people. But from reading the comments very few people here seam to even know what E911 compeared to 911, much less how it works.
/. tell they think of regulating my favrote thing, like it is suposte to be.
I am a card carying GOP and NRA member and I hate regs and tax's unlike most of the commies that post on
UNDERSTAND what the real issue is. it is E911, but that would require reading the origional arguments from the MN PUC.
Also i know
All is fine and dandy on
Most places I've seen dsl, you don't need to have an active phone line/Phone service.. I had dsl before, even after my phone got disconnected, (oops, forgot about that bill) it mattered not..
the phone service was never turned back on, even after paying it off, I had a cell I primarily used and never an issue.. I can't say definatively they would have turned it on, without active phone service, but they never asked, any of the times, or companies I've had dsl with (which is many)
LostboyTNT MercyHosting.Com
Server-Status.Com
50Bux.Com
TLDR.Com