Vonage's CEO Says VoIP Blocking Is 'Censorship'

Avantare writes "CEO of leading VoIP provider says port blocking of VoIP traffic is one potential small step toward an unwanted future of IP-based censorship. According to Vonage Holdings Corp. CEO Jeffrey Citron, intentional blocking of Voice over IP traffic is more than just a competitive dirty trick -- it's an act of censorship against free speech. In an exclusive interview here Tuesday [March 1], Vonage's chief executive said the issue of the company's recent incident of having some VoIP traffic blocked reaches beyond the market for IP-based voice communications and into the realm of free speech -- and as such, should be protected by the courts, the FCC, or by new telecom regulation that ensures free and open access over the Internet."

Comments

Re:Nonsense

[PalmKiller]

I know this is gonna hurt some folks sense of what the internet is, but...VOIP is not a customary internet service, in fact its quite new almost an infant technology. Customary services are FTP, SMTP, and Gopher (pre www browsing) and these traditionally make up the internet. All the new services have been allowed for various reasons (ie HTTP to make it prettier, DNS to make remembering addresses easier, then much later HTTPS for security, etc), but those are the main things people customarily got on the internet for in the beginnings. So if a company offers FTP, SMTP, Gopher and throws in the use of DNS/HTTP/HTTPS traffic, they are allowing what the internet is expected to provide at a bare mininum, everything else you can do is gravy.