You may have to pay more to talk over net
Net telephony will be costlier once Yahoo, MSN, Skype and others are brought under ISP licence.
By TNN |
NEW DELHI: The government proposes to put its stamp of authority over one chunk of hitherto unregulated cyberspace: internet telephony offered by companies like Yahoo, MSN, Skype, Mediaring, Packet8, Dialpad, Amazon, Impetus, Euro, Net2Phone Bandtel and Euro.
Internet telephony, so far a saviour for millions of Indians with kin abroad, is set to become costlier, once the government finalises a proposal to bring internet companies like those mentioned above under the ambit of the country’s Internet Service Provider license.
For consumers, this simply means a rise in tariffs as a Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) or a net telephony call on Skype or Yahoo will soon attract a service tax of 12.24%, in addition to a revenue share of 6%.
Although nearly a fifth in percentage terms, the tariff increase in absolute terms would still be small, say two cents a minute. This will also bring cheer to Indian ISPs which for long have been demanding a level-playing field.
This comes on the heels of similar attempts to regulate the services offered by global online giants in India. Google should know, or it will, once the Maharashtra government follows the Bombay High Court’s order to issue the company a notice on allegedly spreading hatred against India through a community called ‘I hate India’ on its social networking site Orkut.
The HC has also appealed to the government to appoint a controller under the Information Technology Act, ’00, to regulate all such communities in operation on the internet.
Government sources justified the move stating that these companies did not have the requisite licenses to offer net telephony services. In South Korea earlier this year, Skype was banned for offering services without the requisite license.
More importantly, the move to bring messenger-based telephony services under licence regulations will also address the crucial factor of national security.
Currently, these companies do not provide any call records to intelligence agencies in India, nor are they mandated to install monitoring equipment.
For these companies, the implications are a lot bigger. In addition to sharing revenues and paying levies in India, they will also have to invest in monitoring mechanisms and share call records with the security agencies here.
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In an earlier letter to the Department of Telecom, the Internet Service Providers Association of India (ISPAI) had said, “Internet telephony services can be offered in India either by an ISP specifically permitted to do so or by a unified access service licensee. However, several service providers such as Skype, Net2Phone, Yahoo, and MSN, are providing Internet telephony services to people in India.”
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