I ran across an interesting article about AT&T and Google Voice. I received an invitation to use Google Voice, and I find it very useful. It rings several phones when my Google Voice phone number is called, allowing me to give that number to a select few whom I want to be able to contact me anywhere.
The article covers a dispute between AT&T and Google, and in involves the FCC. Regulation of the phone system isn’t straightforward in reconciling public good with private enterprise.
Here is the opening of the article, but I recommend reading the entire thing:
AT&T vs. Google Voice: Sex, money, the feds, and your phone bill
Sam Gustin
Oct 9th 2009 at 2:50PMDespite what a handful of lawmakers may say, the dispute between Google (GOOG) and AT&T (T) over the search giant’s Google Voice application is not so much about fairness or rural access as it is about steamy phone sex and piles of money. These lawmakers, including Steve Buyer, an Indiana Republican and John Shimkus, an Illinois Republican — who have received a combined $200,000 from AT&T and Verizon over their careers, according to Opensecrets.org — have written to the FCC complaining that Google’s refusal to connect expensive rural calls is “ill conceived and unfair to our rural constituents.”
The FCC is set to open an investigation to determine if that’s true, according to Dow Jones, and will formally notify Google of the inquest later Friday. But why all the interest in Google Voice from AT&T, Congress and now the FCC? After all, Google Voice is available by invite only, and only a relative handful of people are using it. So why is everyone in such a lather about it? And why is AT&T expending so much energy to create roadblocks to its tiny new rival?
Technically, the dispute is over FCC regulations governing how long-distance and local phone companies pay each other for traffic that passes from national to local networks. Since Congress deregulated the telecommunications industry in 1996, much of this traffic comprises extremely lucrative sex chat lines, which the national carriers wind up paying for. AT&T has never been happy about that, and it’s now livid that Google Voice can avoid having to connect such calls — thus dodging this twisted fee scheme.
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Cross-posted between Random Fate and The Moderate Voice.
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