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Costa Rica May Criminalize VoIP

Posted by timothy on from the man-versus-the-state-telco dept.

chia_monkey writes "Here's an interesting little tidbit about the 'free' Internet. Seems Costa Rica may make it a crime to make Internet-based phone calls. It would be a shame if this sets a precedent of setting legistlation that would seriously stunt the growth of these emerging technologies that should be making communication cheaper and easier, not harder and illegal."

3 of 407 comments (clear)

  1. yup by Traldan · · Score: 0, Redundant

    Yeah, that's very wrong.

  2. Huzzah for tyranny! by Willeh · · Score: 0, Redundant
    From the looks of it, the real issue here is the fact that the people of CR don't want to pay the prices of the local telco anymore, and as a way to rebel against that (unless the telco also owns the xDSL lines) they can now with Skype et al. The problem is such that the telco happens to also have the control of the police and decisionmakers of the country, so it's a small step to easily criminalize anything that threatens the monopoly.

    What's next, opening up government sponsored gameservers and criminalizing people that want to run their own local fps server?

    --
    Will wank off Linus Torvalds for fame.
  3. Re:Stealth Phone by raju1kabir · · Score: 0, Redundant
    This might be the move that forces cryptophones into popular acceptance. How will their cops know that our two streams are VoIP, when we use two random ports, negotiated at an httpd (port 80), and our connections are encrypted to noise?

    Um, because they watched you negotiate your media stream link at that port-80 connection?

    --
    "Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS