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If your interested in Public Internet telephony you interested in the regulatory battle occurring between cable Internet providers and the FCC. In short many people would like the FCC to enforce neutral network operation on the cable industry. Meaning they cannot use there power over the pipe to control what content you see or do not see. The cable industry has claimed that the FCC does not have jurisdiction over them and anyway they can self regulate just fine.
Why does this matter to Voip over the net? Well if the cables providers start offering voice services, as several have, what is to stop them from throttling the bandwidth to FWD, sipphone.com, Vonage, Packet8, etc? If they view these services as competition they might just ban there use completely and block the IP addresses. Sound far fetched? It's actually pretty easy to imagine.
http://www.lessig.org/blog/ drew my attention to recent developments in this fight. For a good overview of the problem read Lessing's and Tim Wu's submission to the FCC on this issue: http://gullfoss2.fcc.gov/prod/ecfs/retrieve.cgi?native_or_pdf=pdf&id_document=6514683884 and another good Lessing email http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/200212/msg00053.html
Perhaps the Voip community should send a letter of support for Neutral Network regulation to the FCC? I think a full page ad in the WSJ would accomplish more but a letter to the FCC is cheaper.
- Dustin -
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