VoIP Legal Status Worldwide?

Cigarra writes "There was much public debate going on during the last several months here in Paraguay, regarding the 'liberation of Internet,' that is, the lifting of the restriction on ISPs to connect directly to international carriers. Up until this week, they were forced to hire wholesale service from the State run telco, Copaco. During the last month, when the new regulation was almost ready, the real reason supporting the monopoly made it to the headlines: Copaco would fight for the monopoly, fearing VoIP based telephony. Finally, the regulator Conatel resolved today to end the monopoly, but a ruling on VoIP legal status was postponed for 'further study.' I guess this kind of 'problem' arose almost everywhere else in the world, so I ask the international slashdotters crowd: what is VoIP's legal status in your country / state / region? How well did incumbent telcos adapt to it, and overall, just how disruptive was this technology to established operators?"

Comments

In Canada

[Pig Hogger]

Here, in Canada, it is totally free; as there is no single federal telecom monopoly and those are mostly private companies, the issue of monopoly is moot.

Hopefully, this situation will help to drive the Bell Telephone Company of Canada into the ground, which could be sooner than we think as it was not bought by the Ontario Teacher's Fund.

Re:In Canada

[Idiomatick]

Unfortunate that 'free' VOIP you use is going through your Bell internet lines or a ghetto cableco. I use teksavvy dsl and my voip quality and torrent speeds are crappy/throttled. Why? Because Bell is fucking with my connection once it gets to their backbone even though I'm not buying anything from them at all. I don't see a way we can put the company down if they have control over my internet when I'm not even a customer. Maybe they'll start punitive throttling, hitting people not paying them just because they can. Without the government stepping in there is nothing that could be done aside from building a whole new infrastructure.

Past tense of "arise" is "arose"

[BadAnalogyGuy]

The past tense of "arise" is "arose". Like rice.

Needless to say, the opportunity to make a fortune off of VoIP users is being lost. If you are a mobile operator, you just charge per packet. If you are a telco, you just charge a data traffic fee. If you are a cable operator, you just charge people more to get the channels that they really want by splitting them up into "packages" that contain one good channel and 50 crap channels.

Seriously, who the fuck is watching the Lifetime channel?

In Australia its legal

[jonwil]

And we have regulators who would go after any telco who tried to block it.
In fact, many major ISPs are now offering VoIP as part of your Internet connection

If the government tried to ban VoIP in this country, they wouldn't survive the next election.

Maybe thats the problem for people in countries in Latin America and Africa and elsewhere where telephone and Internet service is controlled by state-run/state-backed monopolies. Maybe the people in these countries need to kick the government out (although that assumes that there is a government running the country and not a military general and an army with orders to shoot anyone who has such unclean thoughts as "lets kick the government out" or "lets fight the state-run telco")

Australia

[noz]

People have VoIP in Australia with a publically accessible telephone number (inbound and outbound).

But what you're saying reminds me of mobile phone companies offering internet on 3G mobile phone networks but blocking IM clients fearing their exorbident SMS revenues will disappear.

Only in monopoly markets

[jrumney]

In most of the Western world, Governments decided in the 1980's and 1990's that competition was good for the consumer, and government telecommunications monopolies no longer exist. In those countries, VoIP is just seen as a natural evolution of healthy competition, and though individual operators might try to make life difficult for independent VoIP operators, and lobby for regulations to be imposed based on E911 (ie the ability of emergency services to find), there is no government support for banning healthy competition.

In markets where there is still a government backed monopoly, there might be more inclination to protect that monopoly, but ultimately it is not good for the consumer or the overall economy to protect a dying technology and business model.

Re:Only in monopoly markets

[Velska1]

In my native Finland, I was surprised to see how easy it was to break the monopoly that the government monopoly had on long-distance calls both national and international. But then we always had small, local, privately owned phone companies (or co-ops) handle local telephone business (in densely populated areas, that is). We never had a Ma Bell.

Then when the Internet arose, all comers were welcomed to the field, which gave us one of the best connectivity rates in the world (relative to demographic factors like population density). VoIP took phone carriers by surprise in a way, but mobile phones (and the deregulation of that market) had already destroyed their major cash cow, so they were seemingly happy to have more of an excuse to sell broadband lines.

Of course, I am no industry insider, so there may be more than meets the eye there, but I have never heard a complaint about VoIP traffic. P2P sometimes, not VoIP. The local companies are in the mobile business, too, as an alliance (there has been some consolidation, too), and we have had the highest rate of mobile penetration here until recently.

Re:Only in monopoly markets

[drinkypoo]

In markets where there is still a government backed monopoly

It's always either monopoly or oligopoly. The established players lobby for new barriers to make it harder to be a carrier. The right-of-way is generally granted to a single company. The right to use public spectrum is controlled by a government body, and either auctioned or assigned. In other words, the government very much decides which communications carriers can exist. The government always backs the "current state of affairs" unless they are financially (or, I guess, otherwise) induced to change things.

Re:Only in monopoly markets

[tonyray]

Unfortunately, the US has government backed telecommunication monopolies. E911 is a good example of how it works. In most places in the US, E911 is contracted by the counties with the local telephone monopoly. When the FCC decided that VoIP providers had to provide E911 and gave them only 120 days to invent a method for doing that and putting it into place, the telephone monopolies refused to allow the VoIP providers to connect to E911 because they weren't regulated wireline telephone companies. It took court action to call the FCC off; the court stating that the FCC could not impose a regulation that was impossible to meet and order the phone companies to allow the VoIP carriers to connect to E911. However, there are still many areas of the US where the phone companies are still refusing to allow the VoIP carries to connect to E911 services.

Wiretapping is another example. The monopolies get paid to tap phone lines - averaging about $60,000 per tap. The equipment to do this is expensive, so the government gave the money to the monopolies to implement wiretaping capability years ago. However, the FCC says that not only will they not give money to the VoIP carriers to implement wiretaps, the VoIP companies (unlike the monopolies) must do each wiretap for free or face heavy fines.

On the happy side, Congress exempted from regulation anyone providing VoIP as long as their service doesn't connect to the publicly switch telephone network, PSTN. This means that any one with control of their own DNS can setup a SIP server, sign people up to use their server and it will complete calls to anyone else using SIP. This will break the telephone monoplies once enough people have broadband and realize they don't have to pay to have telephone service (except some tiny charge to the guy with the SIP server, or he may just do it for free). I would suggest an open source SIP server project for Windows because more people would be able to operate a Windows based server and that would speed up the whole process. There is an open source project for Linux, OpenSIP, but it is too difficult for the average enthusiest to setup and operate.

How I see this happening is that there are (soft) SIP phones and SIP PBXs that can select the least cost path to complete a call. This allows the user to use the free route when it is available. As more and more calls are completed by the free routes, people will drop the paid VoIP services. The greatest impact of this will be the phone monopolies PSTN and their very restrictive, high priced VoIP services.

Re:Legal vs Allowed

[mellon]

When the only tool you have is demagoguery, every discussion looks like a nail. Or something like that...

VoIP in Latin America

[Anonymous Coward]

Residential User:
Mexico - Illegal if you don't buy from one of the Telmex concessionaires.
Nicaragua - Illegal. You go to jail for it.
Honduras - Illegal. Jail.
Costa Rica - Illegal. Fine.
Dominican Republic - Illegal. Jail.
Panama - Legal. Do whatever you want.
Colombia - Illegal. They disconnect your Internet line if they catch it.
Venezuela - Legal. Chaves Monopoly.
Brazil - Legal. Plenty of providers.
Argentina - Legal. Plenty of providers.
Chile - Legal. Plenty of providers.

Termination (to leak, connect a VoIP gateway to phone lines or ISDN lines and provide termination to guys like Arbinet):

Mexico: Illegal. Jail.
Nicaragua: Illegal. Fine and Jail.
Costa Rica: Illegal. Fine and Jail.
Honduras: Illegal. Fine and Jail.
Colombia: Illegal. Fine.
Dominican Republic: Illegal. Fine and Jail.
Venezuela: Illegal. Fine and Jail (and some worse stuff...)
Brazil: Illegal. Fine and Jail (They just closed a huge leak there with 12 Cisco 5350s. Guys got fined in 2 million bucks)
Argentina: Legal. You may get problems with your ISP.
Rest: I don't know.

Re:Illegal in India

[stony3k]

VOIP is not illegal in India since 2008. See this press release for more details.

"wisky tango foxtrot? I've been arrested?"

[i_b_don]

So for those countries that outlaw VoIP, what is the extent of their laws? If I play a game on Steam and it has voice chat as part of the game, will I be thrown in jail? If you play xbox live with the headset on, are you busted? If you use an IM which has voice capability is it illegal to turn that on?

Seriously, how can they make this work and still keep a functioning internet? This just seems like craziness to me.

d

Re:Legal vs Allowed

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to sound cynical, but the president simply doesn't have the power to do that. The staff that make up the administration serve at the pleasure of the President of the United States of America. The President of the United States of America serves at the pleasure of the powerful lobby groups.

You think you have a democracy. You don't. You have a show that the big interests put on so you think you have a democracy.

Lets see, in 2 or 3 years, if the RIAA or MPAA have been censured in any meaningful way. Lets see if the US foreign policy takes steps to undo some of the harm of the last 8 years. Lets see if the absurd excesses in power grabbing under the guise of fighting terrorism get rolled back.

My money is on Obama slowly becoming Just Another President, and after his brief pause to make people think he's different, just continuing on the same downward spiral. Lobby groups will want him to make people think that they've made a change, which is why they've allowed Obama to pause the downhill slide for a while, so that people's anger levels subside. Once they are lulled again, the slide can begin again for another decade or so, before the next pause.

It's no different in the UK or Australia. We're all being frog boiled, and we're too stupid and have too short memories to see it.

Re:Deep packet inspection used for blocking VoIP

[sysstemlord]

The software used for calling from internet to telephone are completely illegal in UAE and some other gulf countries, and they block downloading or connecting to their voip servers, however, it's possible to use voip between two computers, and it's also possible to call someone's phone in emirate from abroad using voip software. In other words, it's allowed as long as it doesn't affect the local mobile carrier.

Re:Legal vs Allowed

[drinkypoo]

I was with you right up to that point. Speaking as a person who has served in the Navy, with lots of friends in the Army and Marine Corps, I can say with a high degree of confidence that you are an idiot. How's that armchair of yours? Comfy?

I've had to sit and listen to too many soldiers tell me stories about rape to believe your anecdote. They invariably are a story of grief and remorse about how they didn't stop someone else from doing it. When you add to that that the published stats for rape of female military inductees in the Navy is over 25% - while rape statistics are nearly always under-reported, and rape allegations are almost never false although other kinds of abuse are potentially over-reported.

The simple truth is that occupying militaries pretty much always commit rape on a broad scale, and ours is no exception, nor has it ever been. In addition, the use of prostitutes who were forced into the business in response to the devastation of the local economy due to war can only be seen as a kind of rape, and that is very much SOP for all soldiers anywhere, making war in any time and any place.

Poland

[retsef]

In Poland and EU currently there is no problem with VoIP. There are a lot of companies in EU that support Poland and some Polish companies specialized in Poland. Funny thing is that regular telecommunication companies (like Dialog Telecom -monthly subscription about 10Euro/20USD) sell also their products cheaper via internet wih VOIP (monthly subscription about 2,5Euro/5USD).

In the past polish national telecomunication had monopoly for calls abroad, till 2004 i belive, but nobody respected it.

Lebanon

[welrifai]

In Lebanon, VoIP is actually completely illegal as it circumvents what is in some cases, a state run monopoly, and in other cases, a multi-national firm that's been granted authority to be a monopoly by a ridiculous agreement Lebanon made with the IMF (typical privatization/guarantee of private profits in exchange for a high interest loan). I wouldn't be surprised if most of the developing world is in the same boat...

In The Bahamas

[zotz]

In The Bahamas...

It is claimed that VOIP (say vonage) is illegal. Two local telco's supposedly provide legal voip. One is the government owned former telco monopoly.

all the best,

drew

Re:Legal vs Allowed

[Hatta]

rape allegations are almost never false

How exactly do you determine this? Most rape cases are complete "he said, she said" cases. Given that in 25% of the rape cases where DNA evidence is available the main suspect is exonerated, I'd say your "almost never" is completely wrong. And that's not even counting cases where 1) no DNA evidence is available or 2) consensual sex is followed by a cry of rape.