Perusing my backlogged morning BoingBoing fix I see a Florida tiff where a criminal background checking company wishes to force all on-line dating agencies to put their customers through a check. (It’s always nice if your product is mandatory by law.)
The obvious effect of such a change would be to make people use dating sites not affiliated with Florida in any way.
A hop, skip and intellectual jump later, and we see the same issues with VoIP. The question “should we regulate VoIP?” should meet the retort “can you regulate VoIP?”
I have heard it argued that it is essential to get a single set of federal/EU/world/glactic rules so companies don’t have the costs of dealing with a zillion local sets of rules. But we can solve the problem by making two simple rules. Firstly, the laws of where the service provider has nexus apply, not where the customer may happen to be. This reflects the geographically untethered nature of the Internet. Secondly, the regulatory district needs to be clearly and prominently displayed to the user. If we’re playing Skype by Luxembourg rules, we ought to know without having to grep the whole contract.
We don’t need to get into contortions about defining layers so this only applies to the application layer. Connectivity is local (with the exception of satellite), so the moment you deploy a local lineman or have someone on standby to maintain a central office you gain nexus and local rules apply.
Where a service provider has nexus in several locations, you’ll have to come up with tiebreaker rules to decide who gets to choose which apply. I’ll leave that one to the lawyers to argue over.
For pure connectivity or service I can’t think of why this scheme shouldn’t work. This scheme wouldn’t, however, have fixed the problems I saw at Sprint, where California rules on “billing on behalf of” (BOBO) contaminate the whole country. (BOBO is where your “information service” ringtone is charged on your “telephone service” cellular bill.) Who knows whether the customer has a second home in California and sorta-counts as a resident? Just slap California rules on everyone.
This is a cross-over example: putting application-layer billable items on a connectivity-layer bill. On the other hand, maybe this is exactly the result we want: people who try to mix connectivity and service will face high costs of delivery and compliance; those whose services are purely virtual can pick and choose their regulatorium.
Posted by Martin Geddes at 12:18 PMTrackBack URL for this entry:
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