Subject: [NEXTEL-1] Report calls for VOIP 'regulatory certainty', National policy is advocated

From: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 17 Dec 2003 00:24:11 -0500

Report calls for VOIP 'regulatory certainty', National policy is advocated

By Grant Gross
IDG News Service
December 16, 2003

WASHINGTON
Providers of VOIP (voice over Internet Protocol) telephone services need the
"regulatory certainty" that would be created with a national U.S.  government
policy, a report released Tuesday suggested.
Authors of the report, entitled "The Future of Internet Phone Call Technology:
Regulatory Imperatives to Protect the Promise of VOIP for Industry and
Consumers," advocated a national policy on VOIP that would be relatively free of
regulation but would protect the growing VOIP industry from dozens of state
telecommunications regulations.
(Link to full report http://www.newmillenniumresearch.org/news/voip_nmrc.pdf)
Authors of the report, sponsored by the New Millennium Research Council (NMRC),
suggest that VOIP could transform the telecommunications industry in next five
to 10 years. But the U.S. telecom regulatory policy, which currently imposes
fairly heavy regulations on traditional telephone service and few regulations on
Internet-related services, needs to change as VOIP blurs the lines between the
two communications media, the report's authors said.
The report calls VOIP a "middle ground" between traditional telecom services and
data services. As such, VOIP should be subject to some federal regulations but
should be spared from heavy regulation so that the technology is allowed to
grow, the report's authors said. The report is available at
http://www.newmillenniumresearch.org/news/voip_nmrc.pdf.
VOIP has the potential to cause a "major paradigm shift" in telecom and could
have as big an economic impact as railroads or the printing press, said Dave
McClure, president of the U.S. Internet Industry Association. With telecom
companies moving their telephone calls from circuit-switched telephone networks
to packet-based data, the old regulations and pricing schemes based on circuits
don't make sense, McClure said.
McClure called for a national VOIP policy. During a conference on VOIP at the
U.S. Federal Communications Commission on Dec. 1, FCC Chairman Michael Powell
said he expected the commission to work on a VOIP policy in the next year.
However, treating telephone calls that move over circuits differently from
telephone calls that move partly or fully over the Internet makes little sense,
added McClure, one of the authors of the NMRC report. "We can no longer keep
pretending that packets sent over one kind of network are different than
(information) sent over another kind of network," McClure said at a press
conference Tuesday.
Other authors of the study called for the FCC and Congress to ease regulations
on traditional telecom instead of attempting to shoehorn telecom regulations
into the VOIP industry. "To look at imposing on the new (VOIP) industry the old
rules is really working on the wrong direction," said Lee McKnight, a report
co-author and associate professor of information studies at Syracuse University.

McKnight called on Congress to change the rules on how telecom and information
services are defined and regulated. The current rules are "arbitrary" and a
"relic of the past," he said. With many telecom companies already moving parts
of their voice traffic over the Internet, it is nearly impossible to separate a
telecom service from an Internet service, he said.
"This VOIP is increasingly infecting the entire communications network,"
McKnight added.
Advocates of limited regulation at the Dec. 1 FCC hearing pushed for the FCC to
require such services as enhanced 911, services for the disabled and funding for
telecom services in rural or poor areas. But most attendees there asked the FCC
to stay away from regulating prices for VOIP service, as it has with some
telecom services. Competition between VOIP providers should negate the need for
price-based regulation, said report co-author Martha Garcia-Murillo, assistant
professor of information studies at Syracuse.
Congress and the FCC need to resist the temptation to impose regulations from
the circuit-switched world on VOIP, because heavy-handed regulation could result
in the whole industry moving out of the U.S., added Glenn Woroch, report
co-author and executive director of the Center for Research on Telecommunication
Policy.
Because of VOIP, the FCC has a better opportunity to deregulate traditional
telecom services, Woroch added. VOIP, which makes up about 11 percent of
telephone traffic outside the U.S., has shown the FCC why current regulations
will no longer make sense, he said. "We really need to listen to new
technologies like voice over IP because they expose the warts in the existing
system," Woroch added.
But ending all telecom regulation makes little sense and is unlikely
politically, said Brad Ramsey, general counsel of the National Association of
Regulatory Utility Commissioners. Destroying the current FCC regulatory regime
would cost "a ton of taxpayer money," he said, when asked to comment on the
report.
Telecom regulations give customers a place to complain if their service goes
out, Ramsey said. Rolling back telecom regulations "is a politically naive place
to come from," he said.
Ramsey also questioned why some of the report's authors would suggest state
regulators be kept away from regulating VOIP. "The notion that state regulatory
oversight is somehow going to cause a problem is baffling to me," Ramsey said.
"I don't understand the argument that regulation is going to destroy the
Internet. I'm looking for the empirical evidence."

http://www.infoworld.com/article/03/12/16/HNvoip_1.html

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