The Blog

The FCC internet policy working group held a roundtable discussion [pdf] today about international approaches to IP-enabled services. 

Michael Binder, of the Canadian government, had some interesting things to say.  (Binder's title: Assistant Deputy Minister, Spectrum, Information Technologies and Telecommunications Sector.  Binder says he's “not a regulator” but is nevertheless part of the government.)  

He said [paraphrasing]:  “As a government official, I don't see what the urgency is here [to regulate IP-enabled services].  This is very very early in the game.. . . One can argue that we should wait to see how it unfolds.  The notion of governments and bureaucrats and regulators actually designing a regulatory scheme for the future is hard for me to understand.  How to go into a back room and figure out how industry will go forward — that's an interesting view.  Maybe once there are bottlenecks, regulation will be needed.” 

When Bob Pepper of the FCC asked what government policies could foster the development of VoIP, Binder responded (again paraphrasing):  “Our regulator decided not to regulate the internet a few years back.  This was a major proceeding at a time before VoIP emerged, and we've stuck to this decision.  . . . Sprint and Vonage and others are all providing VoIP services.  One might ask, if they're all coming in, what is it you [regulators] want to change? . . . I think the market will take care of itself. If it's not a good service, no one will subscribe to it.  There should be regulation only if necessary.  What's the necessity?”

Jeff Pulver made some very useful remarks, including (paraphrasing):  “Around the world people have trouble believing things [some services] are really free.  This is radical for people, and certainly for regulators.  The real generation we need to think about is the IM generation.  Presence plus voice plus social networking creates a new era of online communication.  My role is to help protect the future, and make sure that innovation can happen.  Don't think of these services as substitutes for telephony — think of the future.”

This was a complex and interesting morning; the UK and Japanese regulators take quite different approaches than Canada may be taking (UK looks at whether something is a telecommunications service, and appears to be in about the same position as the US — trying to figure out whether there is a market around which lines can be drawn; Japan has already decided that VoIP is a telecommunications service and is regulating accordingly), and several companies cried out for regulatory certainty. 

Nortel, in particular, said balefully that if regulators didn't provide this certainty businesses would have no reason to invest in the vastly improved and increasingly secure broadband networks that Nortel apparently believes must eventually supersede the internet.  Paraphrasing: “The internet is the wild wild west from a security standpoint . . . in order to scale, to make this a dependable, real-world network, companies need to come to commercial agreements about how to treat each other's traffic. This can happen without regulation, as it has with wireless carriers for treatment of roaming customers. . . . The empowerment of consumers to have control over how communications coming their way are treated and routed is key. The only way to make this scale — the internet is fun but we need to get to scale — is to create a network that is much more reliable and predictable than the internet will ever be.”  I may be naive, but this seemed to me to be a pitch by Nortel.

The key tension here appears to be between BT's call for internationally consistent rules that allow companies to sell services, and Canada's point that it seems awfully early to be doing anything at all. There did not appear to be a clear call for emergency services, disabled access, privacy mandates, or any of the other policies discussed in the IP-enabled services NPRM, as far as I could tell — particularly for services that don't interconnect with the traditional telephone network. On the other hand, there wasn't a huge push against them, and CALEA didn't really come up at all (except for an oblique mention of “safety”-oriented policies that would be discussed by the FCC in the near future).

Net impression:  Canada seems like a good place.  Even though this summary comparing the Canadian and US proceedings suggests that Canada is both more focused and more likely to regulate than the US is, Binder left the impression that Canada won't do anything at all.  But, again, he's not a (or “the”) regulator.