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France Demands Skype Register As a Telco
jfruh writes "Skype made a name for itself by largely bypassing the infrastucture — and the costs, and the regulations — of the legacy telecommunications industry. But now the French telecom regulator wants to change that, at least in France. At issue is not the service's VoIP offering, but rather the Skype Out service that allows users to dial phones on traditional networks. Regulators say that this service necessitates that Skype face the same regulations as other telecoms."
"France taxes the crap out of its citizens so we should have seen this coming."
which has nothing to do with this issue.
But hay, just jump on your ignorant bandwagon and toot the crazy horn.
France's person income tax is 0% to 75%..not just 75%. and with Bouclier Fiscal I don't think very many people, if any, pay 75% since it needs to be 1.2million pr more with 2 adults. Not only to the France have a different word for everything, they also have a different tax system.
Perspective:
If you were a family of 2 adults and 3 children making 100,000 Euros you tax rate would be 14%
France taxes, in the real world, are on par, and sometime less then the US taxes..and they have more services.
And of cours,e saying ;'high taxes' is pretty meaningless.
What are the service you get? whats the VALUE overall
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
This comment coming from the land of the porkbarrel project is pathetically laughable...
Seems to me that France should really be embracing open source with open arms -- I bet the only thing holding them back is that so much open source material has already been created by dirty English speakers ;)
The entire French police force is slowly but surely switching to Linux and more generally Open Source software, as are all public schools (although Microsoft did and still does try its usually dirty tricks to prevent that). The entire national assembly (main house of parliament) entirely runs on Linux, from Desktop machines for the députés to servers hosting the live feed/on demand videos. Open Source projects (originating from companies as well as universities and such) regularly obtain grants/funds from official bodies (and in fact, creating an Open Source project is a very favorable point to obtain a lot of those innovation funds). Strong recommendations have been emitted to use only open and standard file formats in all administration, and several projects for laws have been proposed to enforce this, as well as the use of Open Source software in all public administration (not sure any of those were actually passed, though). Skype is also officially forbidden in high-level universities and official research organizations, essentially because it is closed source and thus theoretically prone to potential spying/security issues.
Seems to me that France is *already* embracing Open Source with open arms.