Telof — A New Hope for VoIP

May 17, 2005

The Internet’s openness makes it a perfect tool for disintermediation (a seven syllable word for something as simple as “cutting out the middle man”).  One of the earlier mottos of the Net (attributed to John Gilmore) was “The Internet sees censorship as damage, and routes around it”  implying that no  obstacle whether economic, political or social would be insurmountable in a connected world. 

Alas, as we’ve seen, the disruptive nature of Internet technology has not fulfilled that promise to the extent envisioned by early net libertarians.  It turns out people are like cows when they’re on-line.  They’re not smart enough to route around the simplest of obstacles.  Prof. Zittrain calls this the Bovinization principle (or was it a theorem?).

The same is true to a certain extent when it comes to VoIP.  Here, the obstacles were the regulatory regime and the dominant telcos.  While Filipinos can enjoy the benefits of VoIP through foreign providers like Vonage and Net2Phone, inbound traffic must still route through the telco’s local exchanges.  This means that any VoIP provider interested in offering services for inbound calls must have some sort of arrangement with the telcos.  Even the NTC’s draft VoIP rules anticipate as much. (more…)

Dean Alfar on Guerilla Writing

For those of you who missed Dean Alfar’s excellent talk at iBlog, read his blog entry on guerilla writing.  It’s a must read.