Net Telephony Protest May Jam Federal Switchboards

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April 07, 1998 (9:31 AM EDT)

Net Telephony Protest May Jam Federal Switchboards

By Phil Jones,

U.S. lawmakers may see their switchboards jammed this week, after an Internet telephony company offered consumers the chance to call them free if they want to lobby against proposed service charges on Internet telephone calls.

The Federal Communications Commission is expected to rule on Friday whether Internet telephony providers should pay the same universal service charge as telecommunications carriers. However, leaks from within the commission indicate that the U.S. regulator has already decided to impose the charge on Internet telephony calls, a move some Internet telephony providers said might double the industry's charges.

Now Santa Clara, Calif.-based IDT, one of the world's leading Internet telephony operators, and developer of the Net2Phone software many PC-to-phone telephony users use, said it will fire back at the commission. It is offering free calls to anyone who wants to lobby against the service charges on Internet calls, regardless of where they are in the world.

However, though calls over its international network will be free, the company confirmed that consumers will first have to download the necessary Net2Phone client software.

The company said it would be particularly disadvantaged by the levying of the service charge on Internet calls because it already pays the fee on all the calls it terminates via its network in the United States. "The way our service routes calls, we're paying the fee the moment a [foreign] calls hits our gateway. Now we'll have to pay twice," said a spokeswoman for the company.

"We have to stop this here. If this goes through, it will be mirrored internationally," the IDT spokeswoman said, referring to the ongoing interest of the European Commission in the whole issue of Internet telephony regulation.

The European Commission has yet to make its official position clear, and it may not impose the service charge on Internet telephony at all. Alternatively, it may seek only to impose it on Internet call operators who, unlike IDT, do not already pay the service charge because they do not terminate calls over their own network.