TELECOM Digest OnLine - Sorted: Re: Vonage's Citron Says VoIP Blocking Is 'Censorship'

Re: Vonage's Citron Says VoIP Blocking Is 'Censorship'

Isaiah Beard (sacredpoet@sacredpoet.com)
Fri, 04 Mar 2005 15:05:33 -0500

> My local convenience store and drugstore carry certain newspapers, but
> not all for my area. Does that mean they are _censoring_ the ones
> they don't sell? According to Vonage they are.

You comparison is overbroad and overreaching, and compares apples to
oranges.

I would think of it more this way: let's say that your phone company
provider, be it Verizon or other LEC, decided that profanity should no
longer be used on its phone lines, and installs special filters to
capture and "bleep out" such speech. Would that be acceptable?

Okay, you're a clean-talking person, and I can respect that. What if
Verizon happened to be more, say, left leaning in who it favors
politically, and every time you wanted to talk to someone about how
great the president is, the connection would go dead, because Verizon
doesn't want to carry that kind of traffic? Yet strangely, calls
praising anyone of Democratic affiliation never have this problem.
That would be a little odd, wouldn't it? Would that be acceptable?
Of course, Verizon could say "If you don't like it, go find another
phone carrier!," but gee, they've done a really good job of stifling
competition lately, and your ISP happens to be blocking Vonage. Pity,
that.

Or! Even if we don't want to argue the constitutional route, let's go
the technical route as to what are ethical business practices. Let's
say that the local wireless provider installs a Motorola mobile
telephone switch. Instantly, every phone in the network that isn't
manufactured by Motorola gets lower connection priorities, are forced
to transmit and receive in downsampled codes, miss calls, and calls
that do make it through randomly drop, while all Motorola-branded
phones are exhibiting remarkably crystal-clear reception. Would that
be considered acceptable and ethical to you?

E-mail fudged to thwart spammers.
Transpose the c's and a's in my e-mail address to reply.

Post Followup Article Use your browser's quoting feature to quote article into reply
Go to Next message: Dean: "Re: Vonage's Citron Says VoIP Blocking Is 'Censorship'"
Go to Previous message: Isaiah Beard: "Re: Voom Goes Boom"
May be in reply to: Charles Cryderman: "Vonage's Citron Says VoIP Blocking Is 'Censorship'"
Next in thread: Dean: "Re: Vonage's Citron Says VoIP Blocking Is 'Censorship'"
TELECOM Digest: Home Page