While the treatment of voice-over-Internet protocol (VoIP) servic...
While the treatment of voice-over-Internet protocol (VoIP) services is a “front burner issue” for regulators, both the FCC and the states have been taking action on it, including initiating proceedings, for several years, law firm Lampert & O'Connor said…
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in a white paper issued Tues. It said the FCC’s 1998 Report to Congress, in which the Commission first addressed the regulatory classification of VoIP services, and newly pending FCC dockets would form the “basis” of the forthcoming rulemaking, as well as state actions on VoIP. In the Report to Congress, the FCC generally concluded that it was not necessarily appropriate to subject VoIP services to federal telecom regulation at that time and confirmed the agency’s earlier statutory interpretation that “telecommunications” and “information” services were mutually exclusive terms under the Communications Act. While the FCC indicated then that if VoIP looked and operated like traditional telephony, it should be treated like telephony, it stopped short of making any final pronouncement, instead offering a general framework for specific decisions yet to come. The Report distinguish between 2 types of services: (1) Computer-to-computer VoIP. (2) Phone-to-phone VoIP. The white paper reviews state and federal regulatory actions involving VoIP services and provides an overview of the key issues facing regulators, VoIP service providers, consumers and competitors -- www.l- olaw.com.