Too complex to regulate

Two years ago, when Internet telephony was still in its infancy, America's Carriers Telecommunication Association first began asking the FCC to regulate this emerging technology. Critics of this plan pointed out that separating voice traffic from other traffic traveling over the Internet was technologically unfeasible, and the FCC itself told Telephony that regulating the Internet was a task it had neither the resources nor the desire to tackle.

Apparently, something has changed.

Last week, the FCC announced that it may add fees to Internet long-distance calls. If approved by the five-member commission, the plan could scuttle the plans of a great many carriers-including upstarts such as Qwest Communications and IDT Corp. and established giants such as AT&T.

Apparently, the FCC responded to a bottom-line approach. In a letter to FCC Chairman William E. Kennard, ACTA asserted that Internet telephony may shelter as much as $24 billion a year from universal service "taxes" by 2002, hampering attempts to guarantee universal service.

Hopefully, the commission will realize where this proposal is leading it: into a new, complex environment that acknowledges no boundaries and treats all traffic-voice and data-alike.

Managing time-sensitive traffic such as voice on a network crowded with data is still a daunting task, even for the most advanced network management vendors. Before it could levy fines on this traffic, the FCC would have to devise a plan to cull voice from data, which it is not proposing to tariff, and then establish whether those calls qualified as long-distance. The technology simply isn't available yet to pull this off.

Worst of all, this plan threatens the evolution of the networks we all use. Voice over IP may well be the way all voice traffic is routed in the future. Today, 80% of the traffic traveling over the public network is data, so the logical next step in the development of the nation's networks is to move in the direction of a data-centric network architecture-in other words, IP.

The FCC is on the verge of jumping into a new and complex arena it has no realistic ability to regulate. Hopefully, before it approves a plan that has little chance of being enforced, the commission will realize that the short-term benefits such a plan would bring to ACTA's membership will have long-term negative effects on the evolution of the telecom industry as a whole.