All posts in VoIP Regulations

VoIP Regs are heating up, here is what Powell has to say of late…

“I think we’re going to do this nation a big disservice if we try to chop the Internet into 51 pieces and every state is allowed to regulate economically any way it chooses. That’s no indictment of states, only as the good of the whole won’t be maximized,” he said. “You’re going to have a hard time. It’s one thing to say, ‘Should you do it?’ but I don’t even understand how they would do it.”

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The Consumer Federation of America (CFA) today presented a new framework for evaluating the importance of open communications networks to the success of the Internet. Federal Communications Commission proposals to abandon the requirement that advanced telecommunications be operated in a nondiscriminatory manner threaten to undermine the vibrant competition and dynamic innovation that the Internet unleashed.

CFA will file the 110-page white paper, The Public Interest in Open
Communications Networks, in nearly a dozen proceedings pending before the FCC and the Courts, proceedings that will affect the future of broadband
communications. The paper argues for principles of open architecture and
includes a 12-page Issue Brief that summarizes the full white paper.

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WASHINGTON — Exempting Internet telephony from state regulations can’t wait for Congress to pass an overall telecom reform bill, U.S. Representative Chip Pickering told fellow lawmakers Wednesday.

While several bills to exempt Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) from state regulations have been introduced in both the House and the Senate, lawmakers have been reluctant to carve out a special niche for VoIP from the overall reform of the 1996 Telecommunications Act planned for next year.

“At a minimum from today, [telecom reform] will take three years,” Pickering told the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet studying telecom reform. “We need to do pre-emption now. If we wait, it will be three years and the market can’t wait.”

Pickering is the sponsor of a bill preventing the FCC from delegating VoIP regulatory authority to state and local officials. The legislation also exempts VoIP applications from the FCC’s access charge regime. John Sununu (R-N.H.) is sponsoring similar legislation in the Senate.

“We should have three policy objectives: promote broadband investment, promote competition and protect consumers,” Pickering said. “We should not have a patchwork of 50 states with different regulations.”

Tuesday’s House hearing drew an overflow crowd to hear an unusually large panel of witnesses, which included officials from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), BellSouth (Quote, Chart), Vonage, At&T (Quote, Chart), Covad, Level 3 (Quote, Chart) and Cablevision (Quote, Chart).

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Panama lawmakers have approved a new regulation that requires all telehony
providers including VoIP service providers, to pay a 12% tax on all
international calls. The tax replaces a $1 per international call fee.

Turkey and Pakistan are expected to adopt similar rules, treating VoIP
providers no different than traditional telcos.

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The top U.S. telecom regulator said Thursday that he has no intention of setting rules for Internet telephony, which he said could have a dramatic impact on voice communications.

Companies that offer voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) have seen rapid growth in recent months as people embrace lower-cost communications online with quality comparable to traditional phones.

“It’s probably the most significant paradigm shift in the entire history of modern communications, since the invention of the telephone,” Michael Powell, chairman of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, told journalists at the World Economic Forum.

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Regulators worry as Net phone service surges

By Hiawatha Bray, Globe Staff, 1/12/2004

After a long, dry spell, things are getting good for Internet entrepreneur Jeff Pulver — if he can just keep the government from mucking it up. Pulver spent the past decade preparing for the day when the world would adopt a technology called Voice Over Internet Protocol, or VOIP, that transmits speech over the Internet as if it were e-mail. The tech bust of the past three years delayed the revolution, but it has finally arrived. Now Pulver wants help from the government, in the form of a good leaving-alone.

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