Telecom Regulation Needs To Be Rewritten To Deal With New Technologies
from the going-the-wrong-way dept
Following on the recent news that the state of Minnesota is trying to force Vonage to comply with the same regulations the phone companies need to comply with, Business Week has a great opinion piece pointing out just how bad an idea this is. Telephony and communications regulations were all written for obsolete technologies and obsolete business models. Forcing new technology companies to fit under those laws is backwards – and will only work to harm the new technology. Instead, telecom rules need to be reconsidered and rewritten to actually match the technology they’re designed to regulate. The problem, of course, is that no one is willing to rip out the current set of rules and start from scratch – so we end up trying to retrofit things into the existing system. It’s a problem that doesn’t look like it’s going to be solved any time soon.
