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California PUC Calls For A Public Hearing On VoIP 114

Posted by timothy from the statist-busybodies-like-to-be-popular-too dept.
Vick points to this story at Voxilla.com, which says that "A California Public Utilities Commissioner has called for public hearings on the agency's recent demand that Voice over IP service providers apply and be certified as full-fledged telephone companies." The anti-regulation arguments, though, mostly seem to hinge on timing and protocol -- I wish more objectors would argue that there are already too many phone regulations, instead of seeming to promise a boatload more captured users (dollars) if we just let VoIP develop for a few years before unchaining the regulators.
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California PUC Calls For A Public Hearing On VoIP More

California PUC Calls For A Public Hearing On VoIP

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  • I'm not sure how they will regulate it. The beauty of VOIP is that I can plug a phone in anywhere and get service as long as I have network connectivity. Of course bandwith, codec set, and any quality of service settings are very important as well.

    Would the regulation be where the VOIP service provider finally does the TDM conversion for the PSTN fall off or would it be on the bandwith and such?

    Personally my favorite VOIP product has to be Avaya's IP Softphone. Can telecommute over a VPN, and the sofpt

    • Re:The Beauty of VOIP (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I'm not sure how they will regulate it.

      Ultimately, VOIP phone service plugs into the real phone system somewhere. It's easy for a regulator to track them down.
  • They have been pushing hard to be in the middle of voice as well as data networks. To get there they need the legitimacy granted by government approval.

  • VoIP doesn't manage physical wires (Score:5, Insightful)

    by crow ( 16139 ) on Sunday October 05, 2003 @11:20AM (#7137295) Homepage Journal
    The big difference between VoIP companies like Vonage and the traditional phone companies is that Vonage doesn't manage any physical connection to its customers. The implications of that one fact are huge.

    First, it means they aren't a natural monopoly. Anyone can start a similar business without investing millions of dollars in each community. The regulatory approach to a non-monopoly should be completely different.

    Second, it means that taxes based on physical connections aren't appropriate. Vonage shouldn't charge for the Universal Connectivity Fund. Granted, there may be good reason to create a Universal Broadband Fund, but that would be based on charges levied by the ISPs, not by secondary service providers.
    • But allowing Vonage to poach the the phone customers in the bandwidth-fortunate territories will be the death of the USF...

      The idea of the USF is to set one regulated price for phone services everywhere in the state, with the overage profits from those connections that are easy to serve in the cities being funneled into paying for customers that the ILEC phone company is required to serve at a loss in the rural areas.

      If Vonage and friends are allowed to continue unregulated, the eventual end is that nobod
      • Unfortunate eh, Where I live the people that live in the rural areas are the ones that can afford the 2 million plus ranchete. Its not clear that I need to be subsidizing these folk. In any case I am prepared to pay the fair marked value for the services I recieve and those that choose to live in rural areas should do the same. Food isnt cheaper in the sticks its more because of increased distribution costs. Why should phone services be any different.
        • Food isnt cheaper in the sticks its more because of increased distribution costs. Why should phone services be any different.

          Because phone service is a necessity, unlike food. (their logic, not mine; feel free to laugh)

          • The rural poor, the elderly and disabled, generally qualify for Food Stamps, other governmental and private charitable food aid and distribution programs. Universal phone service made a profound transformation in both rural and urban life, it is the core of our modern emergency response system, don't expect politicians to abandon the principal anytime soon.
        • In any case I am prepared to pay the fair marked value for the services I recieve and those that choose to live in rural areas should do the same.

          Whether you know it or not, you are benefitting from the regulations that limit how much can be charged for the right of ways for the various paths your phone calls / IP packets take to get to their destination. If you're willing to benefit from regulation, you might as well let other people benefit.


      • But allowing Vonage to poach the the phone customers in the bandwidth-fortunate territories will be the death of the USF...


        And this is bad because?

        Maybe the idea that one price fits all should be discarded in favor of something that more closely fits reality.

        Or maybe not.

        I haven't seen much arguement/evidence either way.

        -- this is not a .sig

      • Re:VoIP doesn't manage physical wires (Score:4, Insightful)

        by silentbozo ( 542534 ) on Sunday October 05, 2003 @04:10PM (#7138998) Journal
        You seem to be ignoring something. If you subscribe to dedicated DSL you're already paying USF on the copper pair going to your house. If I'm going to get VOIP over those copper wires, why should I pay USF twice?

        Think about it. Your argument could easily be applied to wireless - if you let everyone use 802.11b, they should have to pay USF because they might concievably drive established carriers out of business, thus driving down the amount available to fund phone service for schools, libraries, rural and disadvantaged residents, etc.

        I'd rather use these new technologies to provide cost-effective service to everybody, rather than taxing it (and there by limiting its competitiveness) just because an established monopoly is a source of cheap revenue.
      • If the regulatory fees assume a particular level of technology in order to be relevant, then that's indication that the regulation was short sighted. Continuing to enforce such a regulation can only create problems down the road. Especially when innovative new technology skirts the need for those regulations. The impact will be to hold our country at a particular level of technology and enslave us all to it's inefficiencies. Or put another way, if VoIP is saddled with taxes and regulations that were des
    • Let's go over this again. Cellular providers don't have a natural monopoly, but they are regulated. CLECs, who don't have a natural monopoly, are regulated. Are you arguing that only ILECs deserve to be regulated (because of their monopoly)? Or are you arguing that VoIP is somehow special?
      • Let's go over this again. Cellular providers don't have a natural monopoly, but they are regulated. CLECs, who don't have a natural monopoly, are regulated.

        Sorry, try again. Federal law says states can't set prices or erect barriers to companies entering or exiting the mobile telephone marketplace. Cellular service is regulated a bit by the FCC, but unlike the copper-loop-providers, the state PUC's can't touch 'em. States have the usual power to regulate the terms and conditions of service contracts, but

    • As I mentioned before, the are two issues in utilities. One is the monopoly status and the other is reliability. If enough people go to unregulated services, then the reliability we take for granted might be compromised. The reality is that we are very fortunate in the US. Land line reliability is very high. There have several occasion where I had not electricity but had line land service. Cell phone service is not yet reliable enough to take the slack.

      The thing is that these services are growing q

  • well the public use, with a connect to non internet phones, could easily be regulated.

    But private networks, like grand parents calling kids on the other side of the country. that will be harder to track.

    • That's exactly what they're trying to do. A pure VoIP call will be unregulated, it's the companies that are trying to call themselves "The Broadband Phone Company" without registering as a regulated phone company that are being called in...

    • Re:how easy to track? (Score:2, Insightful)

      by kfg ( 145172 )
      Impossible to track. A packet is a packet.

      It's all handled in software too. Calling Roger Wilco or PalTalk "phone services" stretches the definition to the snapping point. For strict peer to peer I could write software myself so regulating the software is pointless to even try. I know tons of teenagers who could do it as well. It isn't rocket science. It isn't even computer science.

      And then what do you call an email with an .ogg file attached?

      Regulationg computer to computer voice transmission over IP ma
  • this affects me personally, as I just submitted the faxwork to cancel/transfer my landline # to my vonage account. For redundancy, I'm getting a new cell plan with more minutes. In other words, it'll cost me a few more bucks a month but I'm still saving heaps of money over the (landline) greedy monster-corp

    Even with the new taxes I still feel much cleaner - kinda like when I dumped cable for my dish...

  • Can't undercut by bypassing regulations (Score:4, Informative)

    by LostCluster ( 625375 ) on Sunday October 05, 2003 @11:25AM (#7137310)
    First, let's clear up a definition issue here: The VoIP we're talking about here isn't the actual protocol, it's the use of VoIP to provide a connection into the PTSN, effectively it's POTS-over-VoIP.

    POTS is a regulated competitve system at this point. You've got the ILEC former monopolies who now are required to bend over backwards to let CLECs into their interfaces. However, everybody in the POTS business is required to submit their payments into the USF, provide free priority 911 connectivity, and other basic things. What the POTS-over-VoIP services are trying to sell themselves as is a replacement to phone service that costs less, but they're making a lot of their cost savings by cutting corners on the services that the companies they're trying to compete with are required to provide.

    That's unfair competition, and something the regulators need to step in on.
    • If I could understand all the acronyms :)

      • Re:Your post would be quite informative (Score:2, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        POTS: Plain Old Telephone System
        PSTN: Public Switched Telephone Network
        ILEC: Incumbent Local Exchange Carrier
        CLEC: Competitive Local Exchange Carrier
        USF: Universal Service Fund

      • Re:Your post would be quite informative (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward
        PTSN -- No clue

        POTS -- Plain Old Telephone Service

        ILEC -- Incumbent Local Exchange Carrier, e.g. SBC, Verizon, or Bell South

        CLEC -- Competitive Local Exchange Carrier -- an upstart telco that sells phone service in competition with the local ILEC. In most cases the CLEC doesn't actually provide phone service. It just resells service provided by the ILEC, who is required by regulators to sell the service to the CLEC at a discount, usually far below the cost of providing the service. Whether such an arr

    • Re:Can't undercut by bypassing regulations (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      figures /. moderators would not only mod this up, but give it some lame description like "informative".

      Your identification of who these companies are is wrong, and your justification of the legal issues is wrong also. You claim

      "But allowing Vonage to poach the the phone customers in the bandwidth-fortunate territories will be the death of the USF.."

      and you claim

      "If Vonage and friends are allowed to continue unregulated, the eventual end is that nobody in the easy-to-serve areas will be paying into the U
    • It's an interesting argument - however, the only "service" you identify is 911. I look at my phone bill every month and notice that a lot of money has been collected to support 911. I go and meet with the people that run the 911 centers and they don't have a lot of money. Seems someone in the middle ate it all. Anyways, perhaps what is needed is to IP enable all the 911 centers - then there will be no argument that the VoIP vendors are taking advantage of the the PSTN providers.

    • Re:Can't undercut by bypassing regulations (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      OK, first of all, they aren't the ILECs' interfaces, or at least, in a sane world they *shouldn't be*... they were paid for by money that resulted from a government granted monopoly... later the infrastructure "ownership" went to the RBOCs, although some of us thought at the time that it would make sense to take it away from the "Baby Bells", put it into the hands of non-profit organizations dedicated solely to its maintenance and enhancement and force them to truly compete in the arena of services.

      That di
    • Ok. So when a company gets themselves a PBX and connects 100 seperate lines to it for their employees, they should, by your argument, not only pay the USF and regulatory fees for the trunk that they plug into their PBX, but also for every single line that they extend to their employees? If not, can you explain how it's different with VoIP? Vonage (et al) already pay USF on the lines that are connecting them to the PSTN. They then, just like a PBX, extend those lines further.

      If you feel justified in tax
      • The "P" in "PBX" stands for "Private". A PBX is used within one organization to route internal calls without going to the PTSN, and to allow the organization to get by with less actual PBX lines than extentions. However, if you operate a PBX, you cannot sell a "PBX service" line to somebody else. You can't sell a phone service without registering as a phone company and complying with all of the regulations that come with being a phone company. Vonage is trying to claim they're not a phone company, yet adve

        • However, if you operate a PBX, you cannot sell a "PBX service" line to somebody else.

          Really? There are tons of businesses that do just this. Go look into office leasing companies. They will sell you a room with a door, a lock, a desk, a chair, and (included in the price) a phone with your very own number that you get to advertise in the phone book as the number of your office. Or you can look at extended stay hotels which do basically the same thing (except for publishing the phone number). Or yo

          • We don't tax things because they're monopolies. We tax things because we need to tax things if we want our government to function. Restaurants aren't a monopolies, so why do most states tax meals?

            We require phone companies to provide standardized levels of service because we consider phone service a utlity, a service we just can't live without these days.

            If Vonage is going to set itself as a competitor to a monopoly, then something's not quite right with that picture. Monopolies by definition don't have c
            • In the case of the phone companies, the only justification that I'm aware of for taxing them is that they're a monopoly. If the situation were different and did not lend itself to the monopolized environment that we currently have, we simply would not *need* any governing agency to fund. Competition, all by itself, will fill demand. Need stable service, someone who comes up with an idea will provide it. Need E911 service, competition will figure out a way to provide it.

              But that's not the situation we'r
              • Your understanding of the way things works seems a bit broken...

                Taxes do not need justifications linked to what they're assessed against. It's sometimes politically popular to link a tax to "because it's wrong" or "because that's what causes the problem we need to pay for" but there's no need to do so. Taxes exist simply because the government needs to raise money somehow, and the government arbitrailily picks the things it wants to tax through a process called "legislature" based on what's politically acc
          • In both of those examples, the phone lines never leave the physical building. You can even extend this to college campuses, where the phone service is usually lumped into student housing fees.

            In all those cases, the phone line stays within the orginization, and that's the key. They're not offering phone services to the public, they're offering phone services to those renting place to stay/work there.

            And don't think that market is unregulated either. Yeah, they can charge a higher price for use, but they h

  • Breaking the monopoly... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Chayce ( 199487 ) *
    I know this is kinda redundant... but does anyone know how much a phone call really costs? Here in the states we pay way more than most other countries... Traviling abroad showed me that. In fact calling home (Texas) from Greece, or Spain, is cheaper than calling from austin to san antonio... I mean really halfway around the world cheaper than a couple hundred miles. The only reason why it's so expensive here is that we have more regulations than other countries, and fewer telcoms. If the price was lowered
    • You're forgetting that in most of Europe "the phone company" is a money-losing government monopoly...
      • No in eur you use a long distance company, the state lost monopoly on long distance AGES ago, few national carriers are still government owned, sometimes the govt has ownership of something like 25% So no, the fact that I pay about 6 eurocents ($0.05 US) per minute to the US is because of deregulation and good old capitalist competition. Before the liberalisation of the eur phone market a call to the us cost about $1 US (one dollar) a minute, but thats more than a decade ago. Time for you to update!

  • Just use end to end VoIP (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Skapare ( 16644 ) on Sunday October 05, 2003 @11:25AM (#7137314) Homepage

    Once there is enough high speed IP deployed, we can bypass the traditional voice phone network entirely, and run voice over encrypted end to end IP connections. Imagine "dialing" in the form of domain names. The only reason the regulators are getting into this is because VoIP services are interfacing with the existing voice network. More work needs to be done to phase that voice network out of existance (which will be a long slow thing).

    • Imagine "dialing" in the form of domain names.

      That is exactly what SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) [columbia.edu] does. Instead of a phone number, a SIP URI (Uniform Resource Identifier) is dialed (e.g. sip:me@sipcall.com). IP phones that support SIP, like the Cisco 7960, Pingtel xPressa and others, allow dialing SIP URI's via the numeric keypad. Mobile networks based on 3G/UMTS (release 5) use SIP for signalling, blurring the line between the PSTN and IP communications.

      • One thing that would be important with this is to ensure that the traffic is not only encrypted, but also that the nature of it (that a given session is voice traffic) is hidden. So other kinds of traffic need to be using the same thing. With TLS/SSL, the port number used is still in the clear, so the type of traffic can be inferred. While it would still be possible to do something else of that encrypted path, what is really needed is that the standard allow the end point only to know anything about what

  • Purpose of regulation irrelevant to VoIP (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Texas Rose on Lava L ( 712928 ) on Sunday October 05, 2003 @11:26AM (#7137322) Homepage Journal
    The whole reason why telephone providers are so closely regulated by the government is that the market for land lines is a natural monopoly - that is, competition is impossible because a competitor would have to install a redundant network, which is prohibitively expensive. So, since monopoly is inevitable, the government regulates it to ensure the providers don't take unfair advantage of the monopoly.

    With VoIP, there is no monopoly. There can be dozens of different VoIP providers just as there's dozens (ok thousands) of pr0n sites or dozens of online bookstores.

    When we have a new technology, why don't we rethink the way we regulate things instead of just applying the old regulations to the new technology regardless of whether or not it makes sense to do so?

    • The breakup of AT&T back in the 1980's was done all wrong. They broke things between local phone service and long distance service. The whole thing came about because of competition in long distance. Now we have competition in local calling, plus internet and VoIP. The one thing that remains a monopoly is the physical infrastructure. Had the breakup been done so that one well-regulated company owns and manages the physical infrastructure, and all the rest get to complete (with regulation gradually

    • That whole regulation model is somewhat messed up. Anytime you have a regulator, they have to know very well what's going on in the field and be able to act accordingly.

      You're presuming competence and transparency anytime you regulate like this- you tell me how well they're doing!

      The free market way to regulate this is to accept that the physical network is a natural monopoly, and then to put up operation of it up for bid every 3-4 years (in regional chunks of course). That way the market ensures tran

  • Can someone show me just where in the Bill of Rights it talks about Corporations?

    In all the law and criminal justice classes I have been taking these past 2 years, I always got the impression that the Constitution and, more specifically, the Bill of Rights defined:
    the limits that the Government can infringe on the Pre-existing rights of Human Beings

    Corporations are entities created by governments, and therefore have only the rights granted to them by those governments.

    Now point me to a lin
    • Send this to the Dave Berry one!
    • Corporations are created by individuals, not the government. They are only chartered by the government. Corporations are comprised of people. To infringe on the rights of corporations would infringe on the rights of individuals. All rights that people posses come from natural law, not the government. The only rights government has is those that the citizenry grant it. Corporation and tax laws view corporations as legal persons. You do not seem to understand the Bill of Rights, or to have read it. Se
      • This is incorrect. People don't have the right to form corporations, that's a privaledge that is granted by the government. In exchange for the benefits of operating as a corporation (as opposed to a partnership) the corporation has to submit to any restrictions that the government imposes.
    • Read Bastiat's The Law. It argues that governments get their authority from individuals to protect individual rights. Thus, governments cannot ever plunder property or violate the inherent rights of one individual on the behalf of another. There is a reason that although regarded as one of the clearest-thinking economists, and The Law as one of the best essays on a just society, he is not taught in most republics or in most law or economics courses.
  • Didn't Arnold say that the citizens of California were overregulated, among other things? Gov. Arnold will no doubt be more friendly to the free market than the Davis administration. Arguments, no matter if founded completely in fact, will not dissaude overzealous and unaccountable regulators from ignoring an easy power grab. The house needs to be cleared out.
    • This whole VoIP tax issue is entirely about the California State budget deficit (despite that it's already been reduced from $30B to $8B since last year), and not about 1) rationality, 2) long-term economics, or 3) technological feasability. It's like when you can't make your bills and you decide to pawn your wedding ring and your work tools, as stupid and short-sighted as that might be. The consequences aren't being considered at all, in part because the problems will be on someone else's watch anyway so

  • This is double dipping (Score:4, Insightful)

    by cpuffer_hammer ( 31542 ) on Sunday October 05, 2003 @11:33AM (#7137358) Homepage
    You pay your telephony/data tax/fee when you pay your ISP, you should not have to pay again when you use send one kind of bit/byte as apposed to a different kind of bit/byte.
    If you do have to pay then you should be able to subtract the amount from the tax/fee you pay though your ISP.

    Now the moment one of these DSL providers starts connecting lines to peoples houses or other locations then they are a Telco and should act like one.

    I think this is more like a regulatory barrier to entry into voice communications or protectionism for the existing Telco.

    • Does my cable modem bill include the universal service fee? 911 fees?
    • What I am driveling at is that each phone call (line) should pay once. I don't think is is fare for the fee to be collected/recollected at each layer of the OSI model.

      So if I use a dialup line to make a voip call or call a voip gateway with my dialup line should I be paying the same 30cents for 911 fee twice?

      Some weak examples from the non digital world. You don't pay sales tax on a car when you buy it and then pay ex-size tax again when you register it. You pay once. And if you buy a car that never leave
  • It's just like the mafia. If you're making money, they want a peice. Even if you're not, they still had better get thier cut...or else. The only reason the Internet hasn't been taxes thus far is because it'd be too hard to enforce.

    Powerful people expect everyone else to provide for them, and they always get more than they give. The only difference is that the government tells you what they're going to steal up front.
    • :-) The analogy of "government as mafia" is apt.

      One of the most brilliant exposition on this idea is by the late economist Mancur Olson. I highly recommend the read. Amazon link [amazon.com]

      The short summary: the separation of politics and economics is highly artificial (especially in America). The historic record shows that there is a continuum between political governance and economics which relates to the economics of political resource theft. On the far end is "Rape and Pillage" where the political tax is 100

  • Wrong question (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Borealis ( 84417 ) on Sunday October 05, 2003 @11:38AM (#7137384) Homepage
    I think the question should be "how on earth are they going to regulate it", not when. VOIP is just data on the network. How long until there's an open source VOIP solution widely adopted without centralized control?

    It isn't going to be possible to regulate it without extensive packet monitoring.

    • Re:Wrong question (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      They already is www.skype.com from the makers of Kazaa. No interface to the PSTN, yet.......

  • VoIP as a real service (Score:3, Interesting)

    by BanjoBob ( 686644 ) on Sunday October 05, 2003 @11:56AM (#7137482) Homepage Journal
    I worked on a major telco VoIP project and we were working with SIP as a real telephone alternative. Cisco was involved as were other vendors. The whole scope of our project was to replace analog telephony with VoIP with a reliable and clean alternative. VoIP traffic has its own inherent problems which the industry is still trying to resolve.

    So, if the telco I worked for was trying to replace conventional telephone service with VoIP then why wouldn't it be considered a telephone service?
    • So, if the telco I worked for was trying to replace conventional telephone service with VoIP then why wouldn't it be considered a telephone service?

      What makes telco's accountable to regulation is their monopoly ownership of the last mile delivery medium. It don't matter a crap whether they used analog loop, TCP/IP, or fuggin' morse code to deliver service-- the salient point is that they own the copper, and that's what the regulation is based on. No one is suggesting that using VoIP exempts one from regul

  • No big surprise (Score:3, Interesting)

    by CaptainFrito ( 599630 ) on Sunday October 05, 2003 @12:19PM (#7137583)
    C'mon, a Public Utilities Board, who make their living imposing regulations telephone companies want to regulate telephone traffic, and everyone is surprised? PUC's exist because of a lack of competition. VoIP is competitive and therefore poses a threat to their existence. It is self-serving mission creep that they should extend their own charter by thinking that they exist to regulate all forms of voice traffic. What is surprising, is, that it took this long. It was inevitable.

  • I don't get it--can someone explain VOIP to me? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by swordgeek ( 112599 ) on Sunday October 05, 2003 @12:52PM (#7137752) Journal
    I've asked this before, I'll ask it again.

    Maybe I'm being thick here. It seems to me that what we need for VOIP is a peer-to-peer protocol, and network cards/stacks that have a guarantee of service, where in this case, the service is time-based. Now if I'm not mistaken, the Linux 2.4 kernel has 'quality of service' flags for network traffic (including IPv4), and IPv6 has it built into the actual model! Now if this is the case, there should be no need for VOIP "providers," other than ISPs that don't explicitly deny a particular traffic type. Now this is all theoretical for real-time conversations, but in practice it's much easier--people use things like teamspeak all the time!

    Can someone please tell me why we are looking to a centralised (and billable, taxable) VOIP strategy, instead of a direct peered (or even client/server) model? I honestly don't get it!
  • My only landline is VoIP. I work in a large organization - telephonically, we're closely coupled with Verizon.

    In any case, VoIP hasn't been the smoothest road to go down. I've had relibility issues at my desktop, and the phones and back-end are often down/rebooted for "maintenance".

    I'm all for no regulation, but one thing is for sure: the quality of service should be guarenteed to be as good or better than standard analog service. Right now, I feel I'm on the bleeding edge.

    Don't get me wrong: VoIP is

  • shoot yourselves in the foot (Score:3, Interesting)

    by sniggly ( 216454 ) on Sunday October 05, 2003 @03:38PM (#7138801) Journal
    In Europe phone deregulation has created a huge market for ultra-low long distance (less than $0.05 US$ a minute to call from most eur countries to anywhere within the US)

    The same deregulation allows VOIP like Skype [skype.com] simply to take off without any questions being asked (so far).

    If the US were to regulate VOIP and tax it or otherwise inhibit its implementation it will just shoot itself in the foot and hobble into the "human communication over IP" era. Europe, Japan and most of the rest of the world will find no fault in VOIP.

    It remains to be seen if this is entirely true, former national carriers could try to make a last ditch effort but most of them are in such deep financial trouble that they really are dangerously close to bankrupcy.

  • This is not a "use" tax. 911 emergency phone service is useful to everyone whether or not you have phone service. It should be paid for out of the general tax fund.

    The government will try and add taxes wherever it can to supplement the regular tax base.

    Anytime you see a special fee, surcharge or outright tax you should wonder why it's there.

    Using broadband for telephone service is one area where the government has no business.

    M
  • Short Answer: Because VoIP is only superficially like telephone service in the sense that people talk through it.

    The purpose of regulating telephone companies was spelled out explicitly in the 1934 Communications Act, the year the FCC was created:
    "For the purpose of regulating interstate and foreign commerce in communication
    by wire and radio so as to make available, so far as possible, to all the people
    of the United States a rapid, efficient, nationwide, and worldwide wire and
    radio communication service w
  • According to the CPUC's web site, you have to attend the meetings in person to make your voice heard. If you live around SF, make time to go to the meeting and let them know how misguided and ill-conceived VOIP regulation is. If you live in CA and can not attend, you can email your views to residents can send email to CPUC. www.cpuc.ca.gov for more info.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • this is like taxing hotmail as a postal service. just because one technology covers the services previously only covered by another (ie. internet now covers what was once telco only) does not mean that they should be treated as the old entity. General Motors is not a horse-drawn carriage manufacturer. Nor is Vonage a telephone company. Damned stubborn politicians. They're not used to things changing so quickly. They'd better start getting used to it, and stop friggin complaining.
  • The whole "VoIP as telecommunications or data service" argument come down to two main issues for me:

    1) Is the service running over the ILECs/CLECs local network? If yes, the VoIP provider (Vonage, 8x8, etc.) should pay the appropriate fees (USF, access charges, etc.) to the responsible local POTS provider. In other words, PC-to-phone or phone-to-PC is a telecommunications service in the conventional sense of the word.

    2) If the service is exclusively PC-to-PC (even if it connects to a VoIP-enabled ph

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