Nebraska commission loses appeal on Internet call fees [Telecom]

A point of clarification here: this ruling pertains to a state that was attempting to force Vonage to fund a state USF. This is on top of, but separate from the Federal USF. Vonage is still required to fund the Federal USF, as well as Federal Relay and local 911 centers.

One might wonder why, if Vonage has been declared that it is an information service and not a voice service, that it is required to fund any of those.

Nonsense. They're providing telecommunications service.

Correctly so.

Ok, but then don't force the telephone companies to lease lines for their use or accept calls for them.

You'd think by now the country would've learned the dangers of cream skimming and stilted playing fields.

At least the PSC had it right.

This "telecommunications service" versus "information service" is very strange. I've seen it come up many times before, largely for internet service providers. As far as I can figure out, we might consider an "information service" to be something like a newspaper that produces content and delivers that content, but does not deliver content for others. A "telecommunications service" would be more like UPS, which produces nothing, but delivers for others. So, how much "information" does Vonage provide as part of their service? How much "delivery of information for others" do they provide? Same for ISPs. The original Compuserv or AOL which provided a lot of their own content might be considered information services who did their own delivery.

This whole "telecommunications service" versus "information service" needs to be revisited by the FCC.

Harold

Yep. It's an artifical constraint designed to preseve the revenue being generated by the various mandated fees/taxes on POTS service.

The reality is that bits are bits, being voice/date/video, and that if there are socially necessary functions that need to be funded, they should be funded out of general tax revenues.

Ah, but where's the fun in that? If you're going to rob a man, at least have the brains to do it a penny at a time!

By the way, bits are no longer bits: bits that traverse a path in 3 milliseconds are different than those which take 3000.

Bill Horne Temporary Moderator

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What's really ironic is that under the old system none of this was an issue or necessary. Rates were intentionally set so that (1) the bare bottom users could get very cheap phone service and (2) emergency calls were partially paid for by the phone company through its dial zero operators. In an emergency, a dial zero operator would stay on the line as needed. In very small towns, the operator was the 911 call center.

Today we have a bureacracy to qualify low-income people for specially priced phone service (which is still bare bones), when in the past there was nothing to do. You wanted bare bones a la carte service, you got it. You wanted flat rate service or premium equipment, you'd paid more for it.

None of this "FCC Line Charge" or "PIC charges", etc.

One problem today is that established land line carriers are required to eat a lot of bad debts by their states, something that newcomer carriers don't have to worry about.

For a TRUE competitive environment, eliminate all the special burdens on traditional carriers, OR, require newcomer carriers to offer bargain service, take on bad debt, etc.