FCC To Hold First VoIP Hearings; Rules in 2004

securitas writes "The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will hold its first hearings on Internet telephony and VoIP regulation on Dec. 1 and plans to regulate VoIP by late 2004. A public comment period will follow the Dec. 1 meeting. Some say that it is overly ambitious to regulate VoIP by 2004, especially since FCC Commissioner Michael Powell does not have a strong reputation for clarifying complex issues - instead he has a reputation for confounding them. More at Internet.com and InternetWeek . FCC press release (PDF1|DOC1) and attached letter (PDF2|DOC2) to VoIP proponent Senator Ron Wyden, who sits on the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee."

Comments

Regulation not a universal evil

[KD7JZ]

While I am generally in favor of free enterprise, I also do not mind a certain level of regulation. Regulation in the telephone industry is what allows you to pick up any phone, dial 10 digits and reach any other phone in the US. How would it be if you wanted to IM or VOIP your doctor and you are a Yahoo user and the doc is a AIM user??

Re:Regulation not a universal evil

[BoogleBoo]

A small amount of regulation can definitely be a good thing. If we didn't have car crash regulations, rest assure the big 3 would make cars even shittier than they do today. Same applies to any industry. You can't rely on a corporate entity to do anything in the buyer's interests.

Problem with regulations is the standards tend to lack in quality and never seem to be upgraded/reviewed. Back to the car example... bumpers once had a 5 mph impact standard. It's often 2.5 mph today. With today's knowledge of metals and plastics along with detailed crash data, we should be able to make cars low weight that have 50 mph impact standards. Will companies do this out of the kindness of their heart? Hell no. Don't expect the regulators to improve the standard in the next 10 years either.

can they regulate?

[larry bagina]

I question whether they can regulate. Not the timeframe (don't you just love the sound of deadlines as they go whooshing by?), but constitutionally. Particularly recently since the Senate refused to block states from imposing net-access fees, and the Supreme Court has lately scoffed at "interstate commerce" as a justification for laws.

Everyone here would laugh if the US Gov't tried to regulate ftp, http, tcp, udp, ip, etc. They have no authority over VoIP either.

Re:Why

[isdnip]

The FCC has no intention, I am quite sure, of regulating private VoIP, or any computer-to-computer applications. They're really, really, not interested in going there. (I do this stuff for a living. I'm not a lawyer, but I do regulatory work, and often write formal Comments on FCC proceedings. So I stay on top of this sort of thing.) Theoretically, they do have a lot of authority that they do not exercise. But for the past 25 years or so, their direction has been to exercise authority to prevent monopolies from impeding progress. The Internet itself only exists, for instance, because the FCC ordered AT&T, in the 1970s, to remove a restriction on "sharing and resale" of leased line circuits.

The FCC is however interested in a number of very sticky questions that relate to VoIP. The telephone network itself is subject to fairly strict regulation, particularly the amount of money that each carrier is allowed to charge the other carriers on a given call. So when somebody in Virginia calls somebody in California over Qwest's network, how much does VZ in VA get from Q, how much does SBC in CA get from Q? Those are covered by detailed tariffs.

A local leg of an interstate call is not treated the same as a local call. The current regulatory system is based on a system of classification, and that system is obsolete. VoIP increases the pressure on it.

VoIP threatens that because it's so easy to sneak around the usual processes. The current FCC not-quite-rule (an April 1999 "Report to Congress", which is an unofficial policy statement) says that "phone to phone" VoIP calls are just plain calls, subject to the same payments as other calls. PC-to-phone calls, however, are undefined. And there are all sorts of variations. The big phone companies know it, and want to use their influence to make things go their own way. Small, rural local phone companies actually have the most to lose, because they get a much bigger share of their revenue from long distance settlements. Rural state regulators and legislators are very protective of these companies.