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

Censorship...

[blenderking]

Only governments censor. This would be anti-competitive. Semantics, yes, but an important distiction nonetheless.

I'm done, carry forward with the conversation.

Re:There *could* be a way around this.

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.rt.com/man/portmap.8.html

Right not in DNS, but rather the host service.

Maybe we should just IPSec wrap all communications.

Re:There *could* be a way around this.

[Soko]

BIND 9 and the DNS server portion of Microsoft Active Directory(TM) already have this - they're call srv records. Check the RFC or see for yourself here.

Soko

Re:There *could* be a way around this.

[merreborn]

It's called a Well Known Service record (WKS). Actually, rfc 1033 defines the WKS a little differently from what you've purposed. Either way, the whole concept would only make blocking a given port harder, not impossible. If the world can read your DNS records to determine which port the services they need are on, so can your ISP.

Telco agrees to stop blocking VoIP calls

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

C|Net