more on Internet Phone Providers Must Pay Government Fees, FCC Says

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Brad Templeton <btm () templetons com>
Date: June 22, 2006 3:59:35 PM EDT
To: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Cc: stan () colventures com
Subject: Re: [IP] Internet Phone Providers Must Pay Government Fees,  
FCC Says

On Thu, Jun 22, 2006 at 03:16:44PM -0400, David Farber wrote:
> From: Stan Hanks <stan () colventures com>
> Subject: Internet Phone Providers Must Pay Government Fees, FCC Says
>
> I personally find no surprise in this. I have long maintained -- and
> advised clients and portfolio companies alike -- that The Powers  
> That Be
> were going to apply the "duck test" to VoIP-based telephone companies.
> That is, if it looks like a duck, it swims like a duck and it quacks
> like a duck, then by gosh it must BE a duck!
>
> Once you start offering direct inbound dial phone service with "real
> phone numbers", and you're connected to the rest of the public  
> switched
> telephone network, you *ARE* a "telephone company" under any  
> reasonable
> interpretation and as such should be subject to the same rules and
> proceedings to which any other telephone company is subject. Whether
> your transmit signals over copper plant that you've owned since the
> 1800s or via broadband wireless using VoIP is irrelevant.

Sounds reasonable, but it's also dead wrong.  It should be no
surprise that new systems also attempt to implement, within themselves,
everything the old system did.   That's called backwards compatibility,
and you do it both for market reasons (to win customers by not taking
away what they had) and for user interface reasons (give people what
they already know how to use) and many others.

But it seems ludicrous that when systems attempt to be backwards
compatible, that we should _punish_ them for it, with regulations,
the only justification being that we did it to the old systems when
we didn't know better, so we have to cripple things to be consistent.

So of course our new phone systems want to be able to do what old
phone companies did, call in and out of the PSTN.  It would be nuts
to think they would not.   But we've ended up with a regime that leads
to Mr. Hank's suggestion that we saddle the companies if they do this,
but leaves them unregulated if they instead create their own islands of
connectivity.

A PowerPC can emulate a 68000 but it is not a 68000.  A PC can play DVDs
but it is not a DVD player.

The duck test should be revised.  If it is backwards compatible with
a duck, it may swim  like a duck and quck like a duck that does not make
it a duck.

----------------------------------
The USF is to me personally, a terible example to hold up, though 911  
and
CALEA are also bad.  The USF transfers money from customers of a  
giant phone
company in one state often to the same giant phone company in another
state with more political clout.   At the same time, unregulated forces
like WISPs can provide phone service to poor and rural people for  
less than
the urban people paid as the "cheap" rate just a few years ago.  We  
don't
need to subsidize rural states.  We need to open up the market so  
everybody,
even the rural people, get new services for less than what old services
cost.   I and friends put free phone service in the Black Rock Desert  
for
a lark with personal budgets.  You can't get much more rural in the  
lower 48.
The change in what you get when a service can have zero incremental  
cost is
huge compared to what you get with even the few dimes to $ of  
incremental cost
proposed with these old world regs.


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