VOIP.com - Internet Phone Service

Like a bad mashup of Westside Story and the Telecommunication industry, incumbent telephony companies have squared off against the American public in a caged death match for control over the US internet and ultimately, maybe even the whole bag of marbles.

On the one side you have Ma Bell's roughneck offspring and their hooligan cousins in the cable industry. With natural monopolies in both copper wire and fiber optic cable networks, their pockets are deep and their alpha dog position virtually unassailable. The underdog contenders? None other than members of the four-eyed geek patrol, who dreamed up companies like Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Craigslist, MySpace, and Ebay. And mommy bloggers, the voice over IP telephone companies, patients using the net to research their health issues, independent publishers, banks, hospitals, school kids who need help with their homework, small business owners, CEOs of multinational corporations, the little old lady down the street who gets pictures of her grandkids by e-mail, your mom, and well, just about everyone who isn't a Baby Bell or a Cable giant. Congress is supposed to be the referee here, making sure no sucker punches are thrown and nobody gets hit below the belt. Except, for the moment, it seems they're more interested in mopping the brow of the old school telecoms than making sure everyone's playing by the rules.

At the heart of the net neutrality debate lies the question of whether or not the companies who own the access, or pipes, to the internet, have the right to segregate that access, or if the internet's onramps should be considered more like a public utility that everyone should have access to. The way things stand now, once you pay the toll, you get to ride the information superhighway anywhere, at whatever speed you paid for. You can also set up a roadside lemonade stand and sell to as many people as you want, provided you paid for a big enough parking lot.

The service providers argue that, since they built much of the infrastructure for moving information around on the internet, they should be able to take a bigger piece of the pie. They'd like to charge for access to get on the internet, and then throw up additional toll booths everywhere. Internet surfers would have to pay again to access certain lanes of content, and content providers would also pay again, so that when people pulled into a company's little spot in cyberspace, they wouldn't find a bottleneck reminiscent of a 1973 gas line. And everyone would pay yet again for using disruptive technologies like voip internet phone service. And once more, through the taxes that fund those fat subsidies that help offset losses in the phone companies' ledgers.

The Neutrality camp says no one's getting anything for free. The major service providers are already getting paid multiple times for the same stretch of road, and at some point you have to start asking those hard to answer anti-trust questions. They claim that, contrary to the prevailing opinion on Capitol Hill, the telecom companies are already trying to quash their competitors by restricting or slowing access to certain sites. At best, caught-out companies have received a slap on the wrist by the FCC. Last summer, while the American public was getting ready for Labor Day, the net neutrality safeguards that were previously in effect were quietly razored out of the 1996 Telecommunications Act. Since then, the big service providers like AT&T, Comcast and Verizon have literally showered Washington with lobbying dollars while supporters of net neutrality couldn't even get a foot in the door.

Thus far, in this summer's overhaul of the Telecommunication's Act, it's been 3-0, in favor of the telecoms. The House of Representatives failed to include any real protection of net neutrality in their revision. The FCC voted to apply a draconian version of the USF (Universal Service Fund) to voip providers, forcing them to shoulder a crushing tax burden to fund the build out of narrow band capacity that their customers will never use. Quixotically, DSL was also exempted from this tax, although its customers are guaranteed to use those wires. Lastly, before sending it to the floor for deliberation, the Senate Commerce Committee stripped any mention of net neutrality from their Telecommunication legislation. What happens next is anyone's guess.