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FCC Insists Feds Should Regulate VoIP

Posted by timothy on from the divine-right-of-kings dept.

prostoalex writes "FCC Chairman Michael Powell insists federal officials should be the only ones regulating VoIP, as trusting the Internet phone regulations to states would result in patchwork of conflicting legislature. Powell is a strong proponent of VoIP (and a Skype user), and considers it the technology that ignites (not competes with) telecom industry. Research shows that fewer than 1 mln Americans use VoIP today, but that's expected to increase 12x by 2009."

2 of 173 comments (clear)

  1. Inevitable - but where to start .. ? by OneNonly · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Regulation of VoiP is inevitable - especially as it starts to become more main stream (and especially when the major carriers begin to switch over to it).

    I just wish the regulation would start by getting all carriers to allow user defined ENUM records - and allow the Voip revolution to start in a big way.

    If I can specify a SIP address in Enum for my own home phone number, then anyone using SIP phones that looked up ENUM could be routed to this number, and bypass the carrier all together.. But how many carriers can we actually see implementing this without some form of government intervention??

  2. The motivation for this is clear by johnthorensen · · Score: 5, Interesting

    From the telcos' perspective, there is a lot of motivation to centralize the authority over VoIP. Why? Because they know the freight train is coming and they would like to send all their lobbyists to one place (Washington) instead of having to spread their efforts out to every state capitol.

    If you want to protect VoIP, the best thing we can do is have the individual states regulate it. Security through heterogenity works against attacks on technology as well as for computer networks :)

    -JT