Yak4Ever May Not Be Around 4Ever

from the regulatory-arbitrage dept

TechCrunch is reporting on the demise of Yak4Ever, a startup company that exploited a regulatory loophole to allow them to offer free international calls. The bill was being paid by large telephone companies like AT&T and Verizon, which were forced to pay exorbitant rates to connect the calls under the FCC's byzantine long distance regulations. Apparently, the Baby Bells got fed up and simply stopped paying the bills, and the FCC hasn't ruled on the issue quickly enough to keep Yak4Ever in business. We wrote about a similar company, called FreeConference.com, back in January. That one offered free conference calling services, again subsidized by exorbitant interconnection charges. In that case, we criticized AT&T for blocking the calls instead of appealing the fees to the FCC. But regardless of the legal details, it's awfully hard to have much sympathy for either Yak4Ever or FreeConference. It seems pretty clear that they're not creating new wealth; they're just taking advantage of poorly-thought-out FCC regulations to make a buck at the expense of other phone companies. This is one of the reasons regulators should leave interconnection rates to market forces whenever possible. If long-distance interconnection rates were determined in competitive markets the way transit agreements are negotiated between Internet carriers, this sort of regulatory arbitrage wouldn't be a problem. It's only when the FCC is setting rates by fiat that these kinds of opportunities crop up.

Timothy Lee is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Timothy Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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Exploiting Telco Regulations For Free Calls And For Profit (Lots And Lots Of Profit)

from the so-easy,-it's-almost-criminal... dept

Earlier this year, we wrote about how suddenly a bunch of "free" calling services were popping up that all seemed to use phone numbers in Iowa. This included a service that would let you call an Iowa number and from there call anywhere in the world for free as well as a variety of "free conference calling" services. All of these systems were actually exploiting some legacy telco regulations, that were officially designed to help rural telcos get extra money to build out more rural service. Basically, the government allowed rural telcos to charge high termination fees to other telcos when calls from their lines terminated on one of the rural telco's lines. So, if you had AT&T and called your cousin in Iowa who had some small rural telco, AT&T would actually have to pay that telco some charge per minute, with the idea being that the telcos would use that money to invest in infrastructure. Of course, the infrastructure they invested in wasn't exactly building more lines to wire up others in the town, but in VoIP systems so they could reroute calls in to anywhere else, and then team up with various online sites to get as many calls as possible routed through those systems. Then they could just sit back and collect the millions of dollars rolling in from telcos. Broadband Reports points us to an article at the Wall Street Journal going into more details about how this happened -- and how the FCC is now scrambling a bit to see if there's a way they can stop it. In the meantime, the WSJ piece notes that while the telcos have been told by the FCC that they have to keep connecting these calls, they've simply stopped paying any of the termination fees as they await the results of the various lawsuits. Of course, all that's done for now is made the various free conference call services switch to other rural telcos in other states. Eventually, though, they'll run out of other states to go to (or the regulators will finally realize how their regulations are being exploited) and the little regulatory exploit will go away.

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