Will FCC Regulate Internet Phone Calls?

Ridgelift writes "The FCC will begin hearings on Monday December 1st to see if they will get involved in regulating calls placed over the internet. Since a federal court in Minnesota ruled a month ago that calls delivered over the Internet are not subject to state regulation, Qwest, Verizon and SBC have all announced their intention to deliver more calls over their data networks. "The stakes in the debate are huge. Federal and state governments could lose billions of dollars in revenue from regulatory fees if calls moved onto the Internet are no longer subject to the charges.""

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How?

[pdaoust007]

This is all nice and all but how the hell are they going to regulate this exactly? Sure it might be easy to target companies like Vonage but what do you do with all the free services out there like Skype or Free World Dialup?

Re:Detecting internet phone calls

[nodwick]

How could one possibly even detect phone calls?

They're not talking about PC-to-PC voip calls a la Skype, they're talking about regular phone calls carried over voip such as Vonage. The Detroit News has a good layman's summary of the regulation involved now. The highlight:

Vonage typically pays the Bells or Bell rivals sharply reduced fees to carry data traffic at the other end of a call. Some of its calls are handed to long-distance companies, which pay traditional access fees. Similarly, AT&T has started carrying some long-distance calls over Internetlike VOIP networks and paying cut-rate fees to connect at the other end. In this case, the customer has no idea VOIP is involved.

Although this approach lets them dodge many of the regulatory fees due to the internet being untaxed at the moment, they still have to hook into POTS for the local loop. If legislation goes through on taxing voip calls, it'll be relatively easy to meter the incoming calls at the POTS interface and tax accordingly.

That still leaves open the possibility of pure voip to voip calls being undetectable (e.g. between different Vonage customers), but in the near term those sorts of calls are likely to still be in the minority.

Live Streams...

[deathinc]

There apparently will be several live feeds available of the hearing tomorrow for those away from their TVs.

Re:Detecting internet phone calls

[Jason Pollock]

If you want to talk to anyone other than your immediate friends, you will need to go through a directory service, and possibly some gateways. Once it crosses a network, it can be detected.

Even better, there are a lot of police-driven requirements, such as call identification, tracing and intercept. Those WILL NOT be going away during the transition to VoIP. At the end of the day, if the government can't find any other way to do it, they'll force ISPs to put in VoIP proxies and regulate all of the VoIP carriers to route through them. Instant detection and billing. Heck, I wrote one for my last employer!

ISPs already implement charging by destination (mine does) and HTTP port proxies. It isn't hard to go from there to per-port billing.

Even better, SIP (unlike) H.323 tends to play nicer with proxies...

Someone also mentioned routing through Canada. I seem to remember that a US carrier is already in trouble for doing just that, so I think that people will be on the lookout for that one. :)

Regards,
Jason Pollock

On the flip side, has anyone considered what VoIP telemarketing spam would be like? Would the "do not call" list still apply? It would be very interesting to see a spammer initiate several thousand calls and only handle the ones that answer... No longer limited by the number of outgoing trunks...

Re:Sadly,

[orthancstone]

Only 5 states are without a sales tax rate. Yeah, that may be 10 percent but that still isn't many.

Re:Does anyone actually do this?

[AKnightCowboy]

Qwest (or whoever) could take your analog call and digitize it at the CO, route it over IP to the destination CO, then pump it back out analog. Its cheaper for them.

How do you think they do it right now? Lily Tomlin is sitting in your CO in front of a huge switchboard plugging in wires? The telephone network is already packet switched. Putting it over IP doesn't necessarily make it any cheaper. If anything it'll make it less reliable. You'd be going from a protocol that's specially designed from a QOS perspective to a best effort protocol.

Re:What will they do?

[Arker]

Most of the rural US has no Internet service, and likely never will unless some government steps in and either mandates it or provides it.

That's simply untrue. I left one of the most rural areas in the states a couple years ago and we had internet access there and had had it for years. I've friends in other similarly rural places and they have it.

No, they don't have cable modems. They do have dialup, they do have ISDN if they're willing to pay for it. DSL lines are getting put in, slowly, even in the most out of the way spots. And satellite dishes have been available wherever you are for years. They're quite inexpensive today.