Page 360 - Asterisk™: The Future of Telephony

it should be, it also means that an enormous amount of technology churn is an inevi-
table part of keeping any communications system current.

VoIP spam

Yes, it’s coming. There will always be people who believe they have the right to incon-
venience and harass others in their pursuit of money. Efforts are under way to try and
address this, but only time will tell how efficacious they will be.

Fear, uncertainty, and doubt
The industry is making the transition from ignorance to laughter. If Gandhi is correct,
we can expect the fight to begin soon.
As their revenue streams become increasingly threatened by open source telephony,
the traditional industry players are certain to mount a fear campaign, in hopes of un-
dermining the revolution.

Bottleneck engineering
There is a rumor making the rounds that the major network providers will begin to
artificially cripple VoIP traffic by tagging and prioritizing the traffic of their premium
VoIP services and, worse, detecting and bumping any VoIP traffic generated by services
not approved by them.

Some of this is already taking place, with service providers blocking traffic of certain
types through their networks, ostensibly due to some public service being rendered
(such as blocking popular file-sharing services to protect us from piracy). In the United
States, the FCC has taken a clear stand on the matter and fined companies that engage
in such practices. In the rest of the world, regulatory bodies are not always as accepting
of VoIP.
What seems clear is that the community and the network will find ways around block-
ages, just as they always have.

Regulatory wars
The recently departed Chairman of the United States Federal Communications Com-
mission, Michael Powell, delivered a gift that may well have altered the path of the VoIP
revolution. Rather than attempting to regulate VoIP as a telecom service, he has champ-
ioned the concept that VoIP represents an entirely new way of communicating and
requires its own regulatory space in which to evolve.
VoIP will become regulated, but not everywhere as a telephony service. Some of the
regulations that may be created include:

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