[governance] Ethiopia criminalises the use of VOIP

[Daniel Kalchev]

On 18.06.12 14:18, William Drake wrote:
> On Jun 18, 2012, at 12:21 PM, McTim wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> On Mon, Jun 18, 2012 at 3:16 AM, William Drake<william.drake at uzh.ch>  wrote:
>>> Hi Daniel
>>>
>>>
>>> On Jun 18, 2012, at 8:52 AM, Daniel Kalchev wrote:
>>>
>>> The concept, that ITU could bring the "sender pays" accounting mechanism to
>>> Internet is absurd. Yet more absurd is the concept that ITU could enforce
>>> bilateral interconnection arrangements for IP traffic. Remember, this is
>>> precisely what killed X.400 when it saw the (primitive at the time)
>>> competition by Internet-based e-mail (UUCP, SMTP, ...).
>>> Imagine, downloading huge file and having your provider pay you, because
>>> they sent your way more IP packets that you sent back? :)
>>>
>>>
>>> Is this a typo?  It's obviously not you that'd get paid.  They want foreign
>>> (US) ISPs and "OTT service providers" to pay them because you downloaded
>>> using their apparently scarce bandwidth.
>>
>>
>> I assumed Daniel was speaking from a providers (ISP) POV.
> Right, so it was a typo, should have been "your customer downloading a huge file and having a foreign provider pay you".  Just checking. And yes, apparently some providers can imagine that…in their most blissful dreams.

Neither, actually. :-)

I was trying to respond as one who tries to comprehend the 
implications.... being on both sides of the fence.
For, even if I do work on providing certain services to some, I also do 
consume the services of others (and no, not strictly 'larger'/'smaller' 
provider). I do enjoy being just an user, trust me. It is very revealing 
of many weird things.

Yet, like who I am, this was not a typo. It was precisely worded this 
way, in order to extend the concept (because it could happen at some 
point, when someone pushes it): in order to make it very obvious how 
absurd the concept it.

Let me explain. I see trough the hidden agenda of such proposals. The 
idea is, that Internet, being bottom-up effort, has disrupted the world 
monopolies. These monopolies "fought back" by buying the larger 
infrastructure and concentrating bandwidth, services etc... only to find 
out, that because of the nature of Internet, new competition grows up 
out of nowhere. Of course, I am able to recognize and see all this 
because I am with the process since when Internet became an "out of the 
academia" experience. Back then, at the time, we had to resort to user 
groups, "internal business", personal collaboration etc. Some 20 years 
ago, the EUnet network (a business, offering Internet services, without 
any doubt) was in fact defined as "an activity of the European UNIX 
Users Group". Times were so absurd, that we had to make anyone and 
everyone who wanted access to Internet members of (the local chapter of) 
the UNIX Users Group --- before they could get any service.

Make no mistake. Metered use of Internet, the "sender pays" scheme etc 
are what the Telcos and their ITU wants. Only, this scheme works when 
there is one (monopoly) Internet operator in the country, preferably 
state owned (because of all the benefits I outlined earlier) and 
everyone else is their direct users. They get to have the users pay 
"what the Government has decided" and then pay each other on "sender 
pays" principles. Since traffic flows both ways on huge pipes, only the 
smallest members (but larger number) of the club get to actually pay, 
and the largest members just go banqueting at expensive places.

The only trouble with this is, that Internet has already become 
ubiquitous and so popular and also so compelling for them to participate 
and use, that this is not easy to implement anymore. Not that those will 
stop trying, one way or another.

This "voip is unlawful" has been tried everywhere. In my own country, 
there was a period which it was outlawed and for longer period, the 
"Internet services" or even plain data pipes that one could buy from out 
(state owned, but even when it was privatized) monopoly Telcom -- there 
were clauses in the contract "You are prohibited to use VOIP traffic 
over this service". In the beginning they were even pathetic enough to 
try filtering it. Not much after however, the monopoly Telco became 
irrelevant in all data, telephony and Internet communications. Those 
"restrictions" were silently dropped.

Daniel


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