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VOIP to be Made Illegal in India
Krish writes "Providers like Skype, Yahoo, Net2phone, Dialpad, etc. will not be able to offer VOIP in India under the proposed govt. clampdown. BPOs and other call centers will face the axe if they use any of the VOIP services provided by the above companies. It is not clear if this clampdown will affect regular home users."
Call your VOIP carrier's helpdesk and you might get hold of some guy in India.
Trolling is a art,
of the uninformed to try to control what they have no clue about in order to protect outdated and now irrelevant business models... sigh
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I expected this was a phone company wanting to maintain their monopoly, but apparently it's the government wanting to capitalize on taxing VOIP services, and American (and other) providers are obviously not going to pay taxes to the government of India.
Did you mount a military-grade, variable-focus MASER on an unlicensed artificial intelligence?
The short answer: Tax money. VIOP providers were not paying it, so the government is making them illegal.
"It is possible to commit no errors and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life." -Peak Performance
they aren't banning it. they are banning the use of voip that comes from outside the country, doesn't pay taxes, isn't bound by Indian law, etc.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
There needs to be something like a math problem presented as a slightly distorted image whenever you try to post on Slashdot. That way only those with reasonable intelligence can post.
Ask yourself, self, how could this happen?
Some rich and powerful government leaders were sitting around saying, "How do we keep India poor?" After many weeks of deliberation (They aren't very intelligent, of course.) they decided, "That's it! We'll interfere with cheap communication."
And that's exactly why we have strong cryptography.
Government: You're illegally calling people.
You: No, that's e-mail.
Government: Oh.
My other car is first.
In the linked article it states that goal of the proposed legislation is that call centers are not going to be allowed to continue to use unlicensed VOIP. That is a huge difference from the Slashdot headline claiming that India is banning VOIP.
India is quite happy to have them use domestic Indian VOIP providers thereby allowing the government to tax and regulate them. Much like we have in the US where the FCC regulates and taxes VOIP providers.
And as you tread the halls of sanity, You feel so glad to be, Unable to go beyond. I have a message, From another time..
This has absolutely nothing to do with network neutrality. This has to do with companies that are doing business with Indian companies not paying Indian taxes.
That is what is making the Indian government pissed. They are not trying to restrict VOIP for the hell of it. They just want what any government wants- to regulate it and tax it, and if they can't, to make it illegal and then extract fines from it.
"It is possible to commit no errors and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life." -Peak Performance
Here's the British Government:
Government: You're illegally calling people.
You: No, that's e-mail.
Government:Turn over the cryptographic keys so that we know it's email, or spend the next 30 years in jail.
(that's right, in UK it's a crime to not turn over your cryptographic keys/passes.)
It used to be very expensive to build phone lines so they charged to make phone calls.
Since they charged a large amount of money, it was convenient to put a tax on that charge.
VoIP is basically free. If you want to pay someone for higher quality you can but there are so many ways to talk via voice over the internet now it's insane. I can't see how the indian government is going to do this against private individuals any more than they can stop porn, drugs, sex chat, etc.
I think they can make businesses use taxable voip, but data is data for private people.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
The United States does that also.
The difference is, the Indian politicians are having a discussion and planning and what not. The US politicians just slipped the law into a "terrorism" bill at 9:30 p.m. the day before it got voted on, without discussion.
So if you live in the US, don't get to upset with the Indian government. The Indians are probably more free than we are.
If VOIP is illegal, only criminals will have VOIP.
Actually, when I read this, I couldn't help but laugh at all of the dumb companies that thought that they could save money by investing in [India]
There is no question that companies are saving (and making) money by investing billions in India. A few VOIP taxes are not going to change that.
[India] is still, essentially, a third world country.
Nobody said otherwise. India is a developing economy. You have a very strange understanding of economics if you think that you cannot make money in a developing economy. Look at the bushfulls of money that have been made in the last 50 years in (e.g.) Korea, Saudi Arabia, Ireland, China, etc.
They should've realized that a few McDonald's and a rudimentary grasp of English doesn't make a country a first world country, (a good place to do business).
Rapidly growing economies are precisely where you go to do business.
I hope the backwater Indian government continues to tax "outsiders" in their own provincial way so that these stupid companies will learn their lessons.
America's backwater government also taxes "outsiders" in a provicial way. Haven't you heard about Bush's protectionism: http://www.progress.org/2003/trade12.htm
I think that India has a LONG way to go before it should be considered as any kind of technological powerhouse, and I think that this is a strong sign that that is true.
India's software industry alone is worth $20 billion. Tata infotech took 23 years to make its first billion and 23 months to make its second. Is that a powerhouse comparable to the American industry? Probably not. Does it matter? India's tech industry is strong, healthy and growing, no matter how much you might wish otherwise. Save your schadenfreude for someone who deserves it. You might want to read this to learn what's really going on in India: http://www.economist.com/business/PrinterFriendly. cfm?story_id=5300960
The thing that really struck me the most in "new" India, all those malls and food courts and stuff, is how prevalent Chinese food is, among other things. Granted, Indian Chinese isn't quite Chinese as I know :-D, but I've travelled to Hong Kong and throughout most parts of South East Asia, and I don't think I've seen the reverse happening.
India's opening up faster than most ex-pat Indians realize.
We've got the world's largest twenty-something population. Half the country is my age, 24.
Which of the twenty-seven or so educational systems are you talking about? If it is the CBSE or the ICSE, then you'd be hardpressed to explain why they follow it in some schools here in Singapore, or in West Asia and southern Africa, in Tanzania, Kenya and, I understand, South Africa. The educational system per se isnt soul-ripping, but the competition is; never, however, doubt the intent of some of the better designed systems.
:-)
I take it that you haven't worked with these lobbyists? The problem with Indian politics is that it's a huge superset of local politics glued together somehow under the Indian tricolour; the difficulty is in having a larger picture, or in convincing folks to look beyond their backyards. I doubt anybody is malicious though, in their intent; there is a lot of good work being done, albeit slowly. I think we're about to hit the corner in a year or so when folks start demanding action at a national level as well.
Tough work, but there are reasons to be optimistic. All is not lost.
More than mere navel gazing.
This is only for BPOs who might be using internet telephony without paying taxes to the Govt. FYI - Yahoo has been given the license to offer Internet telephony in India. Read here . They will be partnering with VSNL to route their calls.
>> Techflock-flock onto the best bits of technology
"Gather a mob, shoot the bureaucrats between the eyes" "The world would be a better place if this happened more frequently."
Really? It already happens a bit too frequently, and the world is a worse place for it.
Typically it's the mob leaders who don't mind killing people who end up in power (because the "other options" end up dead - doh). And that's how people like Mao, Saddam Hussein, the leaders of Syria, Sudan, etc rise to the top - their opponents either get killed, jailed, or exiled. And that is why Karl Marx's Communism dreams tend to end up as nightmares - because he suggested violence as a means to communism.
If you keep doing that once in a while if you get lucky you get a benevolent dictator or a dictator who somehow thinks that democractic elections are a good idea.
But what are the odds? If you end up in such a scenario it may be better to just wait (leave or stay) and hope that the dictator picks successors who are less violent (which has a higher chance of happening, since the dictator will want to eliminate threats - e.g. others like him). Then when the time is right you make a move for mass civil disobedience - NOT violence and hope the soldiers will disobey as well.
Irrelevant. Read the damn Constitution. It only protects you from being forced to testify against YOURSELF. Skelton is in jail for refusing to give information about SOMEONE ELSE.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
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When they make Voice Over IP illegal, you can switch to Voice over Frame Relay.
:)
I in fact know a call center that specifically has the technology, to avoid the proposed Voice over IP law in Costa Rica. Usually law makers are shortsighted with technology, so there is always a way around.