VAS & VoIP

According to a news item, NTC Director Edgardo Cabarios said that:

The hands of NTC are tied to the Republic Act 7925 [Philippine Public Telecommunications Act of 1995]. As much as there is ground to penalize chikka.com, we cannot do so because there are no penal provisions under the law. We can only order the telcos to stop charging subscribers who receive messages from chikka, Mr. Cabarios said over the telephone. This has some interesting implications for Voice over IP (VoIP) which some sectors are lobbying to be classified as a Value Added Service or VAS:

• First, it’s not a crime to operate a VAS without complying with R.A. 7925. In fact, there’s no penalty at all that the NTC can impose on the errant VAS.  This means that if NTC classifies VoIP as a VAS, then unregistered operators can ply their trade without fear of penal sanctions.
• Second, if you don’t register as a VAS with the NTC, the latter won’t run after you directly but only indirectly - by ordering the PTEs to disconnect you financially.  This means that the NTC will use the PTEs to enforce their regulatory authority.  In the VoIP context, the PTEs would only be too happy to oblige.

This would be well and good except that the NTC has always declared (to my knowledge) that VAS is a de-regulated market.  In fact, when the public clamored for NTC intervention when Globe and Smart reduced their free text allocation (despite suspicious timing),  the NTC said “We can’t do anything. Texting is VAS and VAS is de-regulated.”  This prompted TXTPOWER to sue in a lower court which threw the whole thing back to the NTC and the latter, as expected, did nothing. 

The action taken against Chikka therefore indicates that the “de-regulated” status of the VAS industry is not evenly applied.  It all depends on who is offering the VAS (I still recall the DSL predatory pricing suit filed by the ISPs against a telco, that went nowhere).