I also hate giving the power of regulation to offices or entities in the government, but that’s a different problem.

I would disagree with definition 1. It’s great up to the “and services and applications that enable an end user to send or receive a communication in Internet protocol format”, nothing is sent or received in IP, it’s merely an addressing scheme. I think the first 2 parts of the definition cover TCP and any other communication that uses IP. Also, if I remember correctly, some of the larger network pipes do not use IP as a addressing scheme, and therefore wouldn’t be covered under that definition.

I’m not a lawyer though.

Just remember, every time a law is passed, someone lost some rights.

Absent from today’s conversation was what will happen if we do not act to liberate VOIP and other advanced Internet based communications from the current ability of both the states and the federal government to apply the regulations now applicable to wireline phone calls to Internet based calls. Several states have already attempted to do so. The major reason for our legislative effort is to declare the services to be interstate in nature and subject to exclusive federal jusirdiction and then to instruct the FCC to impose only the minimal regulations I described. If Congress does not act, VOIP may drown in a sea of regulatory excess.

The price for liberating advanced IP services in this fashion will be the continuation of the social obligations identified in the posting. It seems a small price to pay. I believe that a consensus will be achieved on this balance. You can expect a form of this measure to achieve passage in the next Congress.

As the debate heats up next year, weigh in again. I will welcome your views.

Again, apologies for my absence today—I really had the best of intentions.

The power of the police to wiretap wireline voice calls was created when wireline technology came into existence. As such it is only natural that such power to wiretap may be lost when wireline technology is replaced by technology that is incapable of being tapped. Otherwise we will just be attempting to curtail progress and evolution for the sole benefit of the old, entrenched interests. Who by the way can develop other technologies to keep up, but do not care to, because they are fat and lazy.

Technology should not be forced to limit its architecture for the sole purpose of allowing law enforcement the ability to snoop. When wire taps were first allowed, they were allowed in the context of the pre-existing architecture. The police should be able to look where they can look, with judicial oversight, probable cause, no reasonable expectation of privacy etc. However, if the police do not have the capability to insert wiretaps because of their own technological limitations, then we should not have to create access for them. Let law enforcement create their own technology.

It is against the laws of nature to force the rest of us to limit our abilities and choices just so the old guard can hold on to old power without having to evolve and adapt like the rest of us.

I don’t believe that it does. What it says is that it can’t be responsible for information that is only available to the physical layer. And as I and others have said, it doesn’t make any difference whether the government regulates it or not; there is no effective enforcement available – at least not without intrusions into everyone’s privacy and freedoms that no one will (yet) tolerate.

Also, just as you and I don’t have to know the intricacies of fuel mixtures and suspension tuning to drive on the highway, neither does your “average bank robber” have to know how a network works to misuse it effectively, any more than a terrorist has to know how to forge credentials – he can simply rely on someone else to do it for him, and if there’s a buck to be made, someone will do it.

And with the disrespect for law that is now being bred by many current regulatory and law-enforcement trends, it is likely to be commonplace for ordinary “honest” citizens to flout any such laws, even without a criminal profit motive.

There is a huge gulf in technical knowledge between you and the average bank robber. Few people have any idea how to “setup an alternate voice network… or Open Source VOIP software and alter [its] IP ports.”

This has been said a million times, but law enforcement does not need to be perfect to be effective. The fact that an good IT guy can get around wiretaps says little about what the guy who holds up a 7-11 can do.

In response to Brian: Why does the fact that VoIP in a layer-seven app. say anything about whether it should be regulated federally? The point of 911 and wiretapping is to serve the public interest, wherever it may be found on a protocol stack.

Tim

Certain things in your proposal sound good: services to the customer will probably be happily implemented in an open environment. Wiretapping however will probably be met with less enthusiasm. Also: wiretapping wouldn’t work anyway, since anyone who’d have to be worried about being wiretapped would never use a service that can be wiretapped. They’d just create their own way of communicating over the internet, by slightly altering any protocol available.

So I guess it comes down to the question: what would you like to regulate? Services to the customer or government control? For commercial entities, regulation for customer services may be needed. Government control however will never work, neither for commercial nor for free networks.

The FIRST thing VoIP did is to derail the LD gravy train. The only truly competitive price a local provider can charge for LD is zero.

I wish people would understand that VoIP is, as a presentation-layer protocol, NOT something that should be saddled with the requirement to provide 911 service. The point of the 911 network is to provide access to an appropriate service based on the physical location of the user, which is something that you can’t shoehorn into any service above the IP layer, which has neither knowledge of nor control over the physical layer. The providers of the physical-layer services are the only ones who are even capable of providing this service.

As to all the other regulations, there are two glaring problems with applying them to VoIP: first, the market needs them to go away from the old technology, not to be cloned onto the new; second, it’s impossible! VoIP ISN’T an “information service” but a protocol, implemented in software. The only thing that can be regulated about it is the adapter equipment to the PSTN, which is being obsoleted. It will certainly be around for a while, but the more the market takes up IP telephony the faster the PSTN will shrink. Ironically, adding these regulations – particularly the CALEA ones – will accelerate the migration, as the value proposition is weakened by extra cost and lack of freedom.

As for UNE-P, I realize that many people dispute whether the rates are really so low as to lose money for the incumbents. As an ILEC employee myself, I am naturally biased, but aware of the fact, having also worked for AT&T after the divestiture.

But “follow the money”: no one ever lies with his checkbook. Neither the ILECs nor their competition have been building out networks. If the ILECs are not losing money, then they’re making money, right? And if so, they’re making much smaller margins but much greater volume at lower cost (no marketing involved). So even if we didn’t like it, and complained loudly, we’d still be building more, because we’d know we could sell them. Likewise, if the CLECs were getting overcharged, wouldn’t they be building competitive networks to compete with ours?

In other words, wouldn’t BOTH sides be spending on backhoes and bulldozers instead of lawyers and lobbyists? And now, with the rules changed, the ILECs are building again.

The second strikes me as unenforcible. How would you tap a point-to-point connection? What about over VPN? Plus, a lot of this software comes from underground sources–and it’s relatively simple to build such a system.

The first can be taxed and can alter the infrastructures to allow surveillance. They don’t have a large installed based to complain, so it seems this could happen. But since the second method exists, those who wish to opt-out will have a relatively easy time doing so.