Slashdot Mirror
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.""
Well, let's see... the Federal Government is in charge of deciding whether to regulate it... and the Federal Government stands to lose billions in revenue if they don't regulate it...
Well, I'm sure they will do the right thing.
I would go out on a limb to say that the FCC would continue to try and not dabble in the internet's affairs.
Besides which, this medium should be free from government regulation, revenue loss or not.
How could one possibly even detect phone calls? It's not as simple as in the "old, analog" world where it's like there's a phone line, that means there're phone calls.
An internet connection is used for many other tasks (be it web browsing or email or whatever) and one can certainly encrypt and/or hide phone calls so they aren't "visible" as phone calls anymore but just look like usual internet traffic.
Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy. -- Benjamin Franklin
And just how would they enforce any such regulation? VoIP is basically just a program running over existing networks. Cell phones not withstanding, you can no more require charges to be paid than you could charge for email or instant messaging. It's just a communications protocol!
Dyolf Knip
Thanks to some great suggestions by people previously on slashdot I have completely switched to VoIP for my phone service. It rocks.
Previously I had not switched because I was scared of losing 911 service. However, if you have wire running into your house, you can still pick up and dial 911--even without service!
So we have our emergency land-line phone--for free. Now we are using VoIP for everything else.
However, if VoIP starts getting taxes to death, then people like me will switch to something else... and then something else...
Can't the government just stay off these new industries long enough for them to get started?
Well, as telephones started becoming more and more a part of daily life, the systems that they ran on became taxed by the government. I see no reason why the government won't do the same with the Internet. Let's just hope that they do it intelligently (wishful thinking, I know).
Learn from other people's mistakes, you don't have time to make them all on your own.
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?
Maybe you don't, but your carrier might. 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.
There are also companies like Vonage, who provide phone service over your broadband connection. Some of my friends recently dropped their landline and now use Vonage over their cablemodem. They pay a flat fee ($40 i think) for all calls, including long distance.
blog
Do you consider universal affordable phone service to be a social good worth paying for?
That goal of universal phone service is possible only because of the current system of regulation. Regulation is an unfortunate term. It is really a system whereby telephone subscribers in populus areas subsidize subcribers in more rural areas. Regulation allows phone providers a consistent rate of return on their capital investment while keeping rates down for everyone.
I don't know the specifics of the law, but from what I know about the FCC it was founded to regulate wide area transmissions right? Anything to do with radio that passes over public land.
/. readers of how many times we gave those servers beatings for matrix and LOTR trailers) Either they use magic, or their network has more bandwidth than a bittorrent.
Most of the internet now is not publically owned. AOL/Time Warner has some of the nicest backbones in existance (I don't think I need to remind avid
Which causes me to say, what gives the goverment the right to go after a company like AOL if they started providing phone services to it's subscription base. As long as AOL allowed other IP telephony providers to route calls into their networks, which was the community based resource sharing it's creators invisioned, then in essence it is a wide area transmission. If a node goes out, it reroutes.
It's a paradox. We can't have our cake and eat it too and unfortunately for most of John Q Public in the US, the goverment wants to be able to have evidence collecting power. We want privacy and we want a goverment that can defend us from scumbag corporations at the same time.
I think the FCC is a lone tomato rotting in the sun, skin blistering with flys buzzing about it, who's smell of decomposition just barely singes your nose. Regulation did not bring the consumer choice, which is why when deregulation came about the choice in phone service providers skyrocketed.
It's proof that less goverment involvement in phone providers results in better consumer choice. I for one am totally for letting any company do this.
This news is sort of old hat though, since many companies i've worked for over the years had IP based telephony for connecting calls between offices. I know a lot of the insanely big (like AOL/Time warner) have to use IP traffic for their voice data. Cisco does for sure.
There apparently will be several live feeds available of the hearing tomorrow for those away from their TVs.
Nothing is black or white. If there is something they can tax, they will.., as long as they don't get their heads handed to them. Many U.S. states have no sales tax whatsoever. That dosen't fit your nice little theory. Certainly not all consumer goods are taxed. Every road you drive on isn't a toll road.
If you haven't fallen asleep yet, you might want to read an article on taxation. Accuracy not guarenteed, but hey, it's free and it's mostly accurate.
IIRC, phone taxes historically were created two support the poor (as phones were eventually determined to be a basic service that should be available to all) and later to support the 911 emergency location service.
I would be willing to support the frugal application of these two taxes to internet phone usage, except a little more broadly: 911 service given to anyone with an internet connection, and additional phone taxes to cover the cost of providing basic internet connections to the poor.
There may be additional taxes required to regulate the industry (support the FCC a tiny bit, etc) so companies don't completely fleece consumers.
But in the end, the reality is that phone service is so cheap, and internet service so cheap, that to complain about an additional $1/month or less in taxes is being petty.
What? It's $7.00 per month? Well then, fight to the death for your $82/year!
Of course the real issue is that the internet allows anyone to become a phone company overnight, even offshore, so collecting such taxes is going to be practically impossible. Best to go to the local ISPs, turn them into basic phone service providers put a small tax on the internet (flat rate per line/connection regardless of usage or bandwidth) and get rid of the concept of a 'phone company' or 'cable company'. You have connection providers and content providers. Levy the 911 and subsistance tax on the connection. Cellular providers will simply become ISPs, each cell phone a computer, the 'line' between counting as one internet connection. Each person will typically have 2-5 lines (cell, office, home, etc) Since content providers must have a connection, then they too will be taxed. Anyone can become a content provider.
3) Profit!
-Adam
How will they track this, and how will they be able to determine if people are cheating?
OK, so they decide to regulate and tax Voice routed over IP. What about Voice routed over IP routed over some other sort of IP protocol disguised to not look like voice? What about Voice over IP routed through relays in Canada? What if two people are doing VoIP but then claiming "what, this isn't a phone conversation, we're just streaming each others talk radio streaming mp3 stations to each other."
This could become fascinating. We would wind up with this sort of caste structure being created among internet protocols, where this stream of bytes is okay and anonymous but THIS stream of bytes, the government needs to know about it and it needs to be taxed.. just because the latter set of bytes happens to contain audio data of a certain sort. So far the internet has avoided anything of that sort; certain classes of *content* have been differentiated from one another in a regulatory fashion, but never before a class of *data*.
Soon we may wind up with something where the proverbial "Joe Sixpack" pays relatively high fees on his Skype phone he bought at Wal-mart and plugged into the wall, while all the "techies" pay nothing to use their "alternative" VoIP setups. Meanwhile a bizarre cat and mouse game goes on, as the authorities complain about "speech piracy" and attempt to find ways to sniff out VoIP data or prevent "pirate" VoIP programs from connecting to the larger VoIP network, and the tech community comes up with increasingly elaborate ways to keep the authorities to notice what sort of data exactly it is that they're sending.
In the meanwhile, the ongoing effort by router companies to make "smart" routers capable of identifying things like streaming media packets and handling them in a slightly more intelligent manner is scuttled-- because 80% of all streaming audio data no longer looks like streaming audio data.
Anyone have a link to the RAT_PENIS.TXT story?
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Can the existing network infrastructure handle the additional bandwidth that would be demanded, if significant, by VoIP?
How exactly does all of this work? It seems like the existing analog infrastructure would remain in place. After all, asking everyone to replace their existing handsets isn't going to happen anytime soon. Now the phone company will A/D my speech, then send it out directing it to another server local to the number that I dialed, which will D/A my speech and reproduce it for the ear of a person in another home?
If the above is true, it seems that it would make sense for some additional offering from the phone company that would eliminate the A/D portion of the communication and the phone line to your house would become a broadband connection. Make the handset perform the Voice-->IP conversion with embedded software, and I can ditch my dial-up ISP...
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.
Impossible for them to completely tax or control.
Well for a COMPANY trying to sell a service out of VoIP? yeah they can. but the biggest users are the private telcos like me. I have about 10 people on my private VoIP telco right now. I'll be adding another 4 this christmas when they recieve their Creative VoIP blaster alike clones I get from south america and a preconfigured cd with fobbit-phone on it ready for the lumpy's family and friends network.
we save hundreds of dollars a year in long distance, rarely have outages, and only uncle Phil in colorado that has Dial-up has crappy sound quality. Even my travelling Muse Brother uses his in europe from his laptop or internet cafe's.
they cant tax or control me as I use a non-standard protocol and port's. Plus I know of many MANY more people doing the same with other voip hardware. (Note to nay-sayers.. I get direct dial quality and only have latency problems during heavy internet outages... it sounds as good as your overpriced Cisco Voip stuff)
voip is as uncontrollable as http traffic. Even ISP's that claim they block personal webservers can't block a determined users from putting one up.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
They either should remove taxes from my DSL bill OR from phone bill, because right now I pay two sets of taxes. They're trying to eat with two spoons, and this is not the prettiest way to eat, especially if someone feeds you. The fella giving you money may decide you're too greedy and cut off your food supply for good.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A200 32-2003Nov28.html
This is insane. Telecommunications carriers routing phone calls over the internet. This article doesn't even touch upon several issues.
1) Local companies can deliver long distance service (by passing Federal Regulation).
2) Quality of service.
3) Higher rates
4) More profits for the Telco's and higher rates for users.
Let me illustrate. The fees on your bill pay for the telecommunications infrastructure, in part by flat fee on your bill, taxes and some gets taken from each phone call. Now based on this premise, all companies will be routing over the internet. The possible/probable affects will be:
1) distortion on phone calls because traffic is high on the internet.
2) broken speech on calls
3) try calling 911 and have your speech broken up so that the other side cant hear you.
4) higher rates for everyone. Guess what, we all have to pay for the telecommunications network. Now the gov will not be making as much money for supporting the network. To maintain it their will be a raise in rates. Guess who's rates are going to be raised? Flat rate, taxes and per call usage. But what about all the money that the Telco's are making from this cost savings maneuver? That cannot be touched because it was not made on the regulated side of the house.
Now the telecommunications companies will not be governed by the FCC on phone calls. The FCC is the guardian that keeps the Telco's in check. Now there will be no check. Great, unregulated telecommunications companies.
I do not know how the government will tax this, but I am certain that it will not be well thought out or fair. It will be decided by who gets the most money and/or has the best lobby. In both cases, the average citizen will lose. This is how capitalism works: extract the most money you can from everyone. Kind of like a vacation at Disneyland without the fun.
VoIP is just a TCP connection, right? So in general is it even feasible to regulate (i.e., tax) VoIP separately?
If so, this brings up the interesting question of regulating other kinds of TCP traffic. Given things like VPN and SSH, it can be exceedingly difficult to even discover what sort of traffic is carried on a TCP connection. If my employer requires that I set up a VPN link to work, and I happen to have a phone plugged into my computer that uses the VPN to make work calls, how do the regulators measure my use of VoIP. It's just some portion of those encrypted packets going over the VPN connection, but that packets also include my vi sessions, rsyncs, ftps, and all the other things that I do as part of my job. Does this proposal mean that I'll be paying voice-line rates for my all-day VPN connection to work?
You might think that a wireless VoIP phone would be an exception that's easy to regulate. But my current cellphone is also a Palm Pilot, and I can and do use it for web access. Currently, voice and http on this phone use different low-level protocols, so they can measure them separately. But with VoIP, the voice and http connections are just TCP. I also work with databases, and much of that work is voice-like in that it has bursts of data alternating in both directions. Will this have the characteristics of VoIP, and thus be regulated/taxed as phone usage?
One possibility is that we'll suddenly find that all TCP connections are considered "voice" and charged extra. But we can probably all imagine the outrage this would produce - especially from people running commercial web sites.
Anyway, it'd be interesting to hear how they're going to sort out the voice sessions from the data sessions, when they're all just TCP connections.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
I'm sorry, but if traditional telecom is subject to regulation, VOIP ought to be as well. The current regulatory scheme is set up, to some extent, to use local line charges to subsidize other services, in returns for some profit skimming. If we allow VOIP to bypass the local loop for high margin service (e.g. eliminating access charges for LD calls), then we need to rethink regulation.
When your significant other (or you for that matter) has a heart attack, you want to pick up that phone and call 911 and expect someone to pick you up, not to hear that, sorry, there is network congestion or a DDOS attack on the local router. Somebody has to subsidize telecom services for the poor. Etc.
It is certainly not fair to saddle traditional telecom with burdensome rules while exempting new players. At a minimum, the old players ought to have their regulations lifted. Of course, the slashdot crowd doesn't want that either. That would mean they would be exploiting their monopolies.
Quite frankly, I think the subsidies for rural telephone is a myth that AT&T perpetuated to keep its monopoly. "We need a monopoly so we can rob Peter with the justification of maybe paying Paul."
Farming is big business, if there was not a subsidized monopoly, you still would have seen a large number of rural cooperatives, and probably a faster evolution of telephony. In the end, the massive AT&T monopoly was proved overall setback, not a great leap forward for communication technologies.
Regardless of our interpretation of history, I think the wide number of options for rural users makes subsidies even worse. Farms are better served by wireless. There is less maintenance, they have the open bandwidth in the country, and it is more useful.
Costs of routing have dropped so dramatically, that the current tax structure costs more than the service, yet the government is addicted to taxes and will regulate just to collect taxes. They will justify their actions with anti-market myths like the rural phone gap. Don't give in to the game.
PS: If living in the city is more efficient, shouldn't we be encouraging people to live in cities. taxing city folk to give money to country folk ends up creating a market inefficiency.