California Demands Licensure For VoIP Providers

muonzoo writes "Looks like California will be wrangling up the VoIP companies and mowing them down. Or, at least licensing them. CNET has a story about state legislators' push for all VoIP companies in the state to carry a Telephone Operator License. CNET also has a quick blurb about Vonage and how they have recently started charging customers a 'Regulatory Recovery Fee.' Ugly stuff for a young industry." Here's our earlier post about Vonage charging the regulatory recovery fee.

Internal VoIP Included?

[nurb432]

What if i do VoIP totally inside my company. does this sort of garbage effect me as well?

what about software suppliers.. ( both commercial and OSS )

etc etc.

( and no i didnt read it.. link didnt come up here )

Bullshit

[eln]

Just because VoIP involves voice, that does NOT mean it's the same as telephone service. The monopolistic nature of telephone service (only one company can realistically have lines in a given area, particularly in the "last mile") makes heavy regulation and regulatory fees necessary. VoIP does not suffer from this physical limitation to competition, and thus any number of VoIP providers can exist in any area. This is yet another blatant attempt of government to cash in on an emerging technology.

Makes sense to me.....

[Kenja]

Why shouldn't VOIP providers be required by law to follow the same rules as traditional phone serve companies? These rules (amongst other things) protect the consumer from fraud, illegal wire taps and ensures a degree of privacy.

Voice IM?

[moehoward]

What about things like Voice IM? The standards for defining telephony are pretty loose. I talk to people (video conference, voice chat...) over IM all the time via Yahoo and Windows Messenger.

Seems odd to single it out because the lines already exist. I thought that the phone companies were regulated in large part because of the necessity of having only one line per house, rather than 20 providers digging up your town.

Don't most people already pay these access charges in one way or another via ISPs or other downstream providers.

I suspect that the politicians are much more stupid than we assumed. And I mean that.

Re:Why isn't there good peer-to-peer voice over IP

[kwerle]

There are various IM clients that do this.

I use ichat AV [apple.com].

Because Apple is a CA company, and they host part of the ichat solution, it will be interesting to me to see how/if this affects them.

Re:Bullshit

[Shalda]

I'll have to disagree with you here. The issue, as many states now seem to see it, is that at some point VoIP no longer travels over IP. A call originating on IP eventually meets up with the Plain Old Telephone System, wherein any number of regulations apply. The government is not trying to "cash in", they're trying to make everyone play by the same rules. That's pretty much what government does or mostly should. As a libertarian, I think it's appropriate that Vonage be held to the same standards (and fees) as everyone else. Of course, as a libertarian, I also think most of those standards and fees shouldn't exist in the first place, but that's a fight for another day.

Now, there is an argument to be made for the fact that Vonage can't actually verify the physical location of a caller. However, they are using California area codes and California billing addresses, so it's pretty realistic to mandate a California telephone operator's license. As for fees, there's also an argument that there maybe ought to be a different schedule since they're not using traditional land lines. However, I suspect this is an issue cellular providers have long since addressed.

Re:Makes sense to me.....

[Lord MJ]

Because VOIP is an APPLICATION, it uses an Application layer protocol. The fact that that protocol allows one to transmit voice over the internet is totally irrelevant. Taxing VOIP would be no different than taxing http.

Re:This is good

[bigjnsa500]

Why, then would anybody want to earn a decent living? Would you want to be rich when you know 70-80% of your income is going towards these socialist programs? Why be rich at all?

Re:Typical

[Anonymous Coward]

a mutual agreement with Mexico would be sufficient

California doesn't have the power to enter into treaties with foreign nations.

Making doing business in California harder than ever.

If your business revolves around gratuitous credit checks and spamming then you should be driven out. Good riddance.

The fact that the government has the gall to legislate lifestyles is appalling.

Expanding legal rights to gay couples does not constitute "legislating lifestyles," whatever that means.

Re:Triple Bullshit on you

[dubiousmike]

I suppose one theory would be that your fees on cable and DSL lines would go down as revenues are recognized from VoIP fees (by and for the government).

Its just as likely that they will create new infrastructure (buerocracy) to govern VoIP which will give them *some* reason for the new fees. Of course, its easy to justify charging you more than they need to. Then they can do some humanitarian-esqe thing like bring VoIP to farmers and fishermen and guys living under bridges to further provide support for their perpetual existance.

Instead of griping about it, think of a way you can make it pay off for you. Start your own non-profit that makes use of VoIP.