Legislation: Universal Service Reform Act 2005

Voice over internet protocal (VOIP) scares a lot of people, especially people in the government that are confused and frightened about how VOIP is different and what can be done to- you guessed it- regulate the sucker.

There there... a new law called the USF Reform Act being proposed by Reps. Lee Terry (R-Neb.) and Rick Boucher (D-Va.) hopes to tax VOIP to provide funding for the Universal Service Fund, a branch of the FCC that subsidizes rural development. According to a story by wired news, the Act will increase the cost of broadband access to subscribers... a reasonable price to pay.

But (cue scary music) Susan Crawford has some daunting analysis about the Act. From her blog:

Section 4 (starting on p. 17 of the draft) says that another rulemaking is supposed to establish mandatory rules for tracking all services -- presumably so that USF can be assessed. This section is truly startling. It appears, among other things, to outlaw encrypted online traffic. Take a look at this:

Communications service providers [this includes any application that uses IP addresses to provide real-time voice communications] shall ensure that all traffic that originates on their networks contains sufficient information to allow for traffic identification by other communications service providers that transport, transit, or terminate such traffic, including information on the identity of the originating provider, the calling and called parties, and the jurisdiction in which the traffic originates. . . .

This is outrageous. This means that any voice application has to label its packets so that everyone else handling their packets can tell exactly what's going on. Who's talking. Where they are. This is unbelievable.

Such rules shall include mandatory requirements for identification of all traffic by the originating provider and shall require that such traffic identification information is transferred to transporting, transiting, and terminating providers unchanged and unaltered

Read the whole post... the Act is a year off from being pushed through, but such underhanded regulation is quickly becoming more and more common as companies try to reconcile new technologies with old business practices. It's a damn good thing that there are intelligent observers out there to warn of the upcoming peril.