Slashdot Mirror
Costa Rica May Criminalize VoIP
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."
That's the key to all this. They want it to be illegal because the state might lose money.
VOIP was criminilized in South Africa since 1996. It was illegal to make any voip calls whatsoever, that means no MSN Chat, Skype etc.
VOIP became legal on Feb 1005 only after the Telkom (national telco) regulator started to break up Telkom's monopoly.
They should also make it a crime to talk to people without using a phone at all. After all you're just bypassing the phone companies systems by doing so which clearly should be a crime.
Are you talking about the same "Costa Rica" ? The one where I live?
I wouldn't say CR is the most stable and economically successful latin american country...
That's just hilarious. Maybe central american country; and still, that's not something we should feel proud of.
Don't confuse the general situation of the country with the way people like to live. Sadly, we have adopted the american way of buy now, pay forever... But that doesn't mean everyone is wealthy...
And to say something about the topic, what else can you expect from a government controlled company that owns the monopoly on telecommunications and technology? It is true that a lot of people have cellphones, but that's a status symbol, you should be here to see the AWFUL service we get, both on TDMA and GSM.
Let alone talking about Costa Rica being pro-technology, that's just NOT true; only 6 months ago DLS started to be accessible and still the service is just below average.
I read this news on local newspaper a few days ago and I just laughed. Ignorance is a bliss.
- live from Costa Rica !
This is such an ignorant comment. I AM A COSTA RICAN citizen, and I worked there for Acer and Intel before moving to Europe. I know about the state of technological penetration in the country and what qwasty says here is just a bunch of uninformed facts. DSL at home??? Tell that to ALL of my friends there who have been trying for years to even get a decent ISDN connection at home. DSL is not even available to the general public yet. The so called "Advanced Internet" project has been delayed for 3 years now and it is not until last week, that the Costa Rican Institute of Electricity (ICE in Spanish) finished installing the routers to start selling DSL access at prices that are prohibitive to the general population. They will start offering a 128/64 Kbps line for $28/month and YES that is a 128/64Kbps line for that price. The Costa Rica you describe does not sound like the same place where I was born and raised and where I lived for 30 years of my life and which I visited again just recently. Efficient economy and public transportation? REALLY? Please tell me where did you travel in the country so I can move there. I won't even reply to the business ownership stupidity or to the prostitution bit. Now, about the reason for this move by the ICE. The only reason behind this is that Costa Rican telecommunications are a state monopoly (yes, a la MS) and what the ICE is trying to do is either define VoIP as a value-added service and regulate it or have it declared illegal. If you are going to post half-assed information, at least try to be objective about it. For those who can read Spanish, here is an article from La Nacion Costa Rica's largest newspaper, describing the situation. Basically, all they are afraid of is losing the profit from international phone calls, and because all telecommunications use public infrastructure, they would like to be able to regulate it or control it completely. Anyway, please do some research or reading before you post such crap. Better yet, take a plane and go to Costa Rica for real. It might enlighten you a bit.
The entire discussion on Slashdot has centered around a substantial misreading of the article.
The real point of the article is that the Costa Rican national telephone company wants VOIP regulated as a service, like the other phone lines are. We are having the same debate in the United States. The phone company here was originally designed as a monopoly, and universal service meant subsidies. Find a way around the monopoly, and there's no way to fund the subsidies. So you either regulate it enough to collect taxes or do away with the phone service in rural areas (which is often the basis of internet service in those areas as well.)
Costa Rica has similar regulatory issues. So they're in the phase of "Hey, this ought to be regulated." The regulations are completely undefined as yet, so some reporter speculates that they could in some ludicrous limit case result in criminalizing VOIP and then mentions it in the headline, the lead line, and then precisely once in the actual body of the article.
Whereupon Slashdot copies the headline, and focuses the summary on it. Read into the rest of the article and you might find that most of the time when the Slashdot response to an article is "How could anybody be so incredibly stupid?" the answer is usually, "They're not, they've just been taken out of context."
It may well be that any regulation of VOIP is a bad idea, that the Internet wants to be free, and if it outcompetes the old regime then we'll have to come up with a new plan. In Costa Rica's case, if they lose too much tax money from POTS to VOIP, they'll have to raise taxes elsewhere. Perhaps they'd raise a sales tax or income tax. But talk of criminalizing VOIP strikes me as a hysterical response to a subject that requires actual thought.