VoIP Services to be Regulated in Canada

jeffcm writes "It seems that the CRTC, Canada's equivalent to the FCC has decided that VoIP pricing and services should be regulated. From The Globe & Mail: "The CRTC confirmed that it has rejected arguments from Bell and Telus that VoIP should be left unregulated like other on-line applications. If their argument had won the day, their competitors say, the incumbent phone companies would have been allowed to limit the number of new entrants by slashing prices in the short term.""

Comments

Regulating internet traffic? Hm.

[ScrewMaster]

Regardless of the merits of regulating (or not regulationg) VoIP, at the core I'm uncomfortable with the idea of regulating specific types of Internet traffic ... kind of a change from the traditional egalitarian data-cloud "all packets are equal" ideal. I haven't really thought this out, but I just have a bad feeling about it.

There's only one important criterion.

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems pretty obvious to me that shared public resources (physical lines connecting private property together) may need to be regulated to prevent monopolies, while anything that isn't intrinsically limited (multiple protocols over the internet) doesn't need such regulation.

The only reason for the regulation, after all, is to permit competition. Right?

With the VoIP regulation debate, this dichotomy between limited and unlimited resources is often overlooked, when it's actually the only important issue.

The physically shared and limited public connections should be regulated to prevent monopoly. Purely software protocols should be completely immune to regulation.

This is price regulation, not traffic regulation.

[ashitaka]

This ruling has little to do with technology and more to do with business and competition. Skype, FWD et. al. will still be able to offer their free services (which are actually financed by advertising and other means).

This will allow new companies to start offering value-added, non-PSTN phone service without being shut out by the two current major phone service providers using artifically low prices.

Basically, a Good Thing because competition is good.