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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."
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?
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