“AT&T Inc said any new ‘net neutrality’ rules imposed by U.S. regulators need to apply to Web companies like Google Inc as much as to phone companies to ensure a level playing field,” John Poirier and Sinead Carew report for Reuters.
“In a letter to the head of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission’s Wireline Competition Bureau, the biggest U.S. telephone company argued that Google would have an unfair advantage if its Voice service is not subject to the same rules proposed by the FCC on phone operators,” Poirier and Carew report. “‘To the extent ‘net neutrality’ is animated by a concern about ostensible Internet ‘gatekeepers,’ that concern must necessarily apply to application, service, and content providers,’ Robert Quinn, AT&T’s senior vice president for federal regulations, said in the letter addressed to the FCC’s Sharon Gillett.”
“Last week, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski proposed new rules requiring operators to open their networks to any legitimate Internet content or service without discrimination. If adopted, the move would be a victory for big Internet companies at the expense of network operators,” Poirier and Carew report. “The FCC said it had received AT&T’s letter and was reviewing it.”
More in the full article here.
What a bunch of winers!
@mr_matalino,
idk, GOOGLE being subject to the same rules… sounds fair to me. i just want the iPhone open to other networks…
Come on. Someone make this Obama’s fault. I know you can!
Hmmmm, AT&T;complaining about the Google Voice App… interesting.
Okay… No idea how ‘net neutrality’ could apply to GV until I read the article. I didn’t know GV wasn’t serving all domestic phone numbers. Knowing that, seems fair to me. Open the ‘pipes’, open GV to serve all US numbers.
From what I’ve read on other sites, one of the rules the telecoms have to live by involves allowing people to call whomever they want – I suppose we could call that “phone neutrality”.
Google, on the other hand, blocks access to certain rural phone numbers, because it would cost them too much to connect to those areas. So Google isn’t living by “phone neutrality”.
If we’re going to have “net neutrality”, then we ought to have “phone neutrality” too, argues AT&T, which seems to make sense.
The problem is, they’re trying to apply pre-internet telecom regulations to today’s world. Are they asking for all internet voice traffic to fall under FCC telecom regulations? Do we really want some of the more outdated and unnecessary aspects of pre-internet telecom law to put roadblocks around the technological possibilities?
Toasty,
Nah, make it Bush’s fault. You whiney ass Liberals have 8x more pissing and moaning misplaced blame practice than we do. Don’t worry, you’ll be back to bitching about the Prez soon enough.
The government will never stop until they screw up everything.
2010 2012 hush ur big smelly pie hole and delete this app from ur phone….pronto!!
@First
You might be right, although no liberal can possibly match the misplaced, self-righteous outrage of an ultra conservative whine.
Of course, Bush gave us ‘whiney ass liberals’ plenty about which to piss and moan. After all, by completing two terms and handing the election to the Democrats, we are left without Bush, Cheney, or Palin in public office. That greatly reduces the comedic potential of the Daily Show and the Colbert Report. Where are the Bush reruns…?
Seriously – liberal…conservative…drop the labels and think for yourself.
If Google wants to provide a service that terminates voice calls on the PSTN (public switched telephone network), then it should be subject to the telecom regulations that apply to all carriers in the telecom space, including that of universal service. Just because the internal transport mechanism happens to be IP to the PSTN gateway doesn’t absolve Google or any other VoIP<>PSTN provider (such as Vonage or the landline based aspect of Skype) from playing from the same rules.
If Google doesn’t want to provide universal service, then it should be limited to providing service only on the platform for which it is claims to be originating calls, thus the Internet or computer-to-computer calling. As soon as you play in a regulated space, you play by the same rules as everyone else in that space.
Comment from: MacTony
The government will never stop until they screw up everything.
OK, some of you don’t know but Bush got the Achievement Unlock for Screwing up Everything already.
Of course AT&T;will win, because all the other telcos will band with them to lobby the government saying the spread of ad-supported “free” services would just cost millions of American jobs. So the Gov’t will most likely impose levies to make Google a paid service or hog-tie it with all sorts of limitations to ensure “competition”.
Be sure of this: None of it will be good for the consumer.
Look at the mess that ignorant imbecile Hussein has caused.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions… You know what I mean.
@C
…C like coconut… Go back to you KKK.
I would think that a logical reason why GV would NOT be required to service phones in outlying areas is because the government doesn’t force everyone with a phone to pay Google a few bucks every month for that “line access surcharge” that you see on your phone bill every month. (I think that’s what it’s called.)
Let’s just keep government out of the Internet. They love to use program names like “net neutrality” to make everyone think they are to do something good, when in fact when you read the hidden clause in hundreds of pages of documentation you will always find they have an agenda for doing just the opposite. This is just another political control power grab.
@KingMel… I tried thinking for myself once. It was working pretty good… then the govt came along and found a problem that didn’t exist, so they could create legislation to supposedly fix it. I knew all along (because I was thinking for myself) that I didn’t need their help with my problems, but of course, they didn’t care. They claimed it was for the “greater good”. It turns out all along that their fix was actually for the vocal minority, but the silent majority remained silent. During all this thinking, I realized that the government doesn’t want us to do what you asked… they don’t want us to think for ourselves.
The network operators let you pay for the internet connection with limitation for the data amount/month.
Why can’t you get what you pay for. Why should they decide which data we can use.
If some data takes up to muuch of there bandwith , then they should not sell this amount of bandwith or make it more expensive to have more bandwith or data/month.
Otherwise it is false advertising.
They are right…net neutrality has to be neutral. It has to apply to AT&T;, Vonage, Skype, Google voice…etc. equally. If not just call it the “Kill AT&T;” bill and save the “net neutrality” name for bill that has true net neutrality.
just my $0.02