UK’s OFCOM drags it’s heels on mobile net neutrality, leaving Skype users banned by many mobile operators. Same in other European markets. Jonathan Browning interviewed Skype’s Jean-Jacques Sahel, head of European regulatory affairs at Skype.
Skype PR supports a mountain climber who brings webcams to schools in developing countries.
 Your kids can Skype Santa (Florida time, Monday, Wednesdays, Fridays through 7 December, 4-5pm) @SandestinResort.
I met a bunch of people at the Enterprise 2.0 conference who don’t use Skype, more who only use it for family video calls, a few who use it for international calls, and several who’ve never been interested enough to try it. It reminds me that, with roughly 180 million active users worldwide and likely only 30 million active in the US and Canada, Skype has a greenfield of more than 200 million North Americans who aren’t using Skype. Building market reach looks like an important strategic goal through 2015. Skype’s net adoption rates (adoption less abandonment) have been large but linear. How will Skype redesign their products and rebalance their portfolio so net adoption rates accelerate?
New rumors iChat may come to iOS. So far it looks like IM, not voice or video. I’d be more interested f iChat came to operating systems outside the Apple universe.
Looks like Microsoft (and therefore Skype) support the horrendous SOPA bill moving through the US Congress. Al ex Wilhelm: “Microsoft is a major player in the Business Software Alliance, along with Apple and 27 other companies. And the BSA supports SOPA.” Learn more and do more to prevent the Internet Blacklist laws.
Pre-flight check in at Sheremetyevo International Airport over Skype. @svo_skype connects you to an operator for an interview, like a video call CAPTCHA. News release: Now for “flights operated by Air Astana, Royal Air Maroc, China Eastern Airlines, Estonian Air, Hainan Airlines, Hong Kong Airlines, Iran Air, Jat Airways, Turkish Airlines, Transaero Airlines, Aerosvit, Ariana Afgan Airlines, Belavia , Dniproavia, Donbasaero, Nord Wind, Oren Air, Air Algerie” although Aeroflot hasn’t committed. Yet.
Skype Bra Fittings from Butterfly Collection Lingerie deliver personal service from the privacy of your home.
Brad Garlinghouse leaves AOL. A real loss.
Citigroup predicts a 2012 Amazon phone. Can’t wait for the “shop” button.
Skype pays musicians to sing Happy Birthday to your friends in their Say It With Skype Facebook app. All the flavors are great but I like The Parlotones’ cover.
New betas:  Skype 5.4 Beta for Mac and Skype 5.7 Beta for Windows, both approaching feature parity, both now with group screen sharing for Premium subscribers. You can IM and video call Facebook friends from within Skype, although this does not include voice calls (unless you unplug your webcam), conference calls or group video calls. Jonathan Rosenberg explains Skype is hosting supernodes on AWS EC2, is operating a gateway for Facebook identity/directory interop, the calls are flowing p2p through the Skype network, and Facebook is keeping some records about users and their activity. Darrell Etherington thinks this could make Skype even more popular, and Skype should integrate Facebook into Skype’s mobile and tablet apps. Skype promotional video for the release (QuickTime).
From my October 2010 Skypebook: 17 More On The Secret Facebook-Skype Roadmap:
- Sync contacts. Not just import, but synchronization. Keep my contacts fresh. TO DO.
- Sync user profile data. My Skype profile is shallow and often stale. Sync my profile data semi-automatically: “Do you approve this update?” TO DO.
- Sync availability. Online, Offline, Busy, In A Call, Do Not Disturb. Facebook has some presence indicators too, from their own chat and from their mobile clients. TO DO.
- Sync currency. What’s the exchange rate between Facebook credits and Skype credits? Let me pay for a long distance SkypeOut call with Facebook credits. TO DO.
- Facebook updates in the Skype contact list. Give me fresher social objects for talking with my contacts. Make it easier to sort contacts by the last time they updated, not just by alpha or the last time they talked with you. DONE.
- Skype history in Facebook’s timeline. Show my friends’ Skype history with me in my Facebook updates. Make it easier to dive back into a Skype conversation from the timeline. TO DO.
- Sync personas. Skype is already asking people to create multiple personas, so they log in with one ID for each job and another for home. Facebook will probably offer something similar so you can choose to keep your professional friends from learning too much about your hobbies and dating habits. Skype and Facebook will negotiate the data models and privacy policies that go with it. TO DO.
- People search. For all the importance of the Global Index to Skype’s operations, the real value is being able to find the right person to talk with. Both parties could do well to blend their search technologies to improve result relevancy and speed. TO DO.
- People recommendations. Skype can’t suggest people you might like or people you might know. Facebook can, so build recommendations into Skype. Skype has very specific data about times of day and places you call from and call to, which Facebook could use to improve recommendations. TO DO.
- Events and scheduling. One of the best social objects is an event. Before the call or chat we often plan and invite and schedule our talk. Skype should integrate with personal calendars and with public and semi-public event listings. Facebook’s have taken off as one of the top event directories along with Eventful and Upcoming. TO DO.
- Chat interop. My facebook friend chatting with me on facebook while I’m in my Skype chat. We each get the medium we choose. Lots of things to work out including persistence, behavior for adding people to a chat, privacy rules, encryption, archiving policy. STARTED.
- Groups sync. Facebook lists and groups should sync up with my Skype contact lists. Define once, update everywhere, always fresh.
- Voice enable facebook chat. TO DO.
- Video enable facebook chat. STARTED (No group video, no screensharing).
- Advertising exchange. Skype has a small but rapidly growing yellow pages business directory, the better for prospects to Skype and SkypeOut your salespeople. Faceskype can cross-sell ads, offer buy-once-and-show-up-everywhere campaigns, improve the sociability and relevance of Skype client ads, offer click-to-call features to Facebook advertisers, etc. TO DO.
- Location check-in sync. Start showing my Facebook Places check-ins in my Skype history and offer to let me check into Facebook Places using mobile Skype. TO DO.
- Workplace editions. Is Facebook’s Yammer-killer just a rumor? Skype is committing to the enterprise too, so both teams should be imagining together. TO DO.
Comcast briefed GigaOm on their new Skype product (720p@30fps webcam, RF remote control, adapter box with HDMI) and an app designed for television, coming early next year. Some integration with your Comcast account for importing contacts. Skype will only partner with Comcast for the next few years, so too bad if you are one of the 81% of customers served by other ISPs. You’ll have to buy a television with Skype inside or dedicate a computer to running Skype on your television.
Licensed family counseling and psychotherapy over Skype. The BC practice says “the new virtual service removes the factor of geographical proximity, and caters to clients who find traditional settings limiting.” Don’t miss your session because you’re in a small town or far from home.
Full Story »
UPDATE: WHOOPS! Financial Times says EU Commission will approve deal, no strings. I guess it still managed to slip through. “Competition reviews are still under way in Russia, Ukraine, Serbia and Taiwan.”
Less than 100 hours from Europe ruling on the Microsoft-Skype purchase, Skype’s Jean-Jacques Sahel shared a Plum report on the economic value of an “open Internet.” (pdf). It’s an argument for net neutrality, including mobile net neutrality. Sahel’s post is Skype asking regulators to protect Skype’s access to the Internet from companies with the power to harm that access. I believe in net neutrality too. Skype wants government protection from powerful carriers but is struggling to avoid similar obligations of access, openness, and giving back as it finds its own power.
I wrote Monday that Skype is too big to slip under regulatory radar. With Microsoft, Skype will no longer be a David to telecom Goliaths. They will be a Goliath. Powerful, vast, and fiercely competitive.
Decentralization of power was at the heart of the Internet’s design and architecture so the net would survive a nuclear attack. "Network neutrality" is a way of repeating that principle. It is unhealthy for the Internet when companies further down the IP stack exploit their power and play favorites among users from higher up the stack.
With great power comes great responsibility. The MicroSkype deal concentrates power. Skype hasn’t shown willingness to do any more than what is required by law.
- They are willing to disrupt landline and mobile operators, but unwilling to enable public services like e911, fund relay services for the hearing or vision impaired, or contribute to funds for improving Internet access.
- They are eager to distribute Skype by bundling software with Microsoft products, but are unwilling to do so in a way that offers a level playing field to rivals.
- They are open to API integration with friends of Microsoft like Facebook and, presumably, Microsoft’s divisions, but they burden their developer program and APIs with untenable terms of service, prohibiting use of their network by use, location, and device and requiring prior approval of any app using their network.
A measure of oversight, ensuring responsible use of power, is fully within the mandate of those approving the acquisition.
Some, like my friend Jim Courtney, worry the EU has been ineffective, citing their failure to protect Netscape from Microsoft’s Internet Explorer in the late 1990s browser wars. Maybe.
Ben Lilienthal suggests switching costs are lower with Skype, so their power may not be as absolute. Sure, but Skype is not a personal data portability champion.
Many want Skype to play fair. Alon Cohen IM’d he’d want Skype to “Support 911, collect and pay taxes like everyone else, or stop offering PSTN phone numbers. (Gov can remove the taxes, which will be just as fine from my perspective). Open up to SIP, provide every Skype with a phone number or URI accessible to other companies..”
So what does Skype’s post, “The open Internet: platform for growth. The open Internet is an essential platform for growth and benefits for all, including telecom operators: it has to be safeguarded” really mean? Regulate Skype and it will cost jobs. Really?
Here’s what the Europe could do:
Have Skype be a fair platform provider, enable third-parties to plug their own software and hardware into the Skype network, preserve consumer choice, support citizen safety like other phone companies, let your users leave with their phone numbers and data, support local and regional consumer rights, tilt the balance toward personal power over state power in this transnational Internet, and collect taxes. Specifically, quoting from my earlier post:
- Microsoft must expose to the developer community all those plumbing features that make the Skype network so effective on the same basis that Skype and the Microsoft app developers receive access.
- Divide Skype departments between the communications infrastructure and the app layer. Make them operate as two separate businesses.
- Compel the Skype Network business to treat all customers at least as well as it treats Microsoft and Skype Apps Division customers.
- Mandate “platform network neutrality” where bits from third-party apps travel through Skype’s network as well as bits from Skype’s own apps.
- Skype must publish protocols so anyone can connect whatever software or service they like to Skype’s network so long as that end point doesn’t harm the network.
- Skype cannot tax, register or otherwise control end users or third-parties connecting to the network.
- Require compliance with emergency service access laws and rules, subject to user opt-out and local law.
- Promote comparable third-party communication products on Microsoft platforms as least as well as you promote Skype.
- Prohibit restrictions on bundling third-party Skype-compatible products with Microsoft products.
- Require compliance with emergency service access laws and rules, subject to user opt-out and local law.
- Skype must accept the transfer of a customer’s existing phone numbers to Skype’s service.
- Skype must enable customers to transfer of a Skype-connected phone number to a competing network.
- Skype should not be allowed to take away company phone numbers once in service.
- Skype must let third-parties extract all customer created and co-created data on behalf of users.
- Forbid Skype from banning “class action” suits by customers in its terms of service.
- Compel Skype to report statistics on government requests by type and country of origin, the way Google does.
- Compel Skype to promptly notify users when they are being surveilled or requests for information about their activities have been demanded by authorities. This should be subject to the laws of the country where the customer claims citizenship. So a US or Chinese government agency could not order Microsoft to spy on the conversations of a French and German national without the consent of the French and German governments.
- Require that Skype APIs and clients disclose to users the jurisdictions of their contacts. You can only make informed choices about whom to talk to or not, what to say or not, if you can assess the consequences.
- Compel Skype to collect fees and taxes from its customers as required of telephone operators. At a minimum, contribute to the fund that pays for relay services for the deaf and blind.
It’s time for Skype to step up.
Corporate citizenship comes with benefits. This is a rare moment to review, renew, revise and modernize the duties that come with that privilege. The United States missed its moment. Will Europe seize theirs?
 Phil Wolff consults with Hookflash, a software company building realtime communication products for effective people. Skype evanwolf, tweet @evanwolf or call +1-510-444-8234 to talk with Phil. Skype Journal is independent of Skype. Phil’s opinions may not represent the views of Hookflash or Skype.
photo: Occupy Wall Street, 26 September 2011, cc-by-sa by Paul Stein.
The European Commission will make a statement on the Microsoft-Skype deal on or before this Friday, 7 October 2011.
Skype is too big to slip under regulatory radar.
Skype was all promise in 2003. Now it is achievement. They are no longer the tiny underdog fighting the phone companies. They are a billion dollar a year business with a thousand employees serving nearly two hundred million people 255 billion of minutes of live conversation every year, rounding slightly. They’ve pulled so much hard currency from national phone companies that Russia’s Chamber of Commerce declared Skype an enemy of the state. They’ve changed consumer behavior and become the default way to talk across borders for anyone with Internet access.
When should regulators consider this a threat?
Now, when an ounce of prevention matters most.
Microsoft wants to multiply Skype’s reach and impact. Microsoft seeks to combine Skype with its other communications properties and bring realtime communication to its non-communication products. Skype, along with Nokia, completes Microsoft’s vision for the Windows Phone operating system. We’ll see Skype inside Microsoft games, Lync business phones, Bing click-and-call adverts, Dynamics call center solutions, Office, Internet Explorer and Internet Explorer.
As huge as Skype is, they could be ten times bigger in a few years with Microsoft’s help. $10B in revenue, 2 billion users, trillions of minutes of live conversation. That comes with market power.
US regulators cleared the deal. A decision by EU authorities is days away.
Who is affected?
At least one Italian VoIP company is reported opposing the deal, per EurActiv. Messagenet asked the authorities to require Microsoft not to bundle Skype with Windows and to compel interop with other Internet presence, IM, telephony, and video chat services.
Full Story »
 OPSWAT reported market share of installed Windows instant messenger apps for 2011Q2 (pdf). With Windows Live Messenger at 40.67% and Skype at 27.39%, that would put Microsoft’s post-acquisition share of the desktop side of the market north of 68%. Should this affect the EC’s merger approval? Does this market consolidation justify anti-trust restrictions?
The report is incomplete on a few fronts.
- OPSWAT’s data source is specific to Windows desktops. So it leaves out web IM services like Google Talk, Mac clients like iChat, tablet apps like Skype for iPad and mobile IM clients like Skype for Android.
- It also wouldn’t register the millions of Facebook chat browser extensions connecting to the Skype network, newly released since the report.
- Microsoft’s other IM clients – MSN Messenger and Office Communicator – are not listed at all. Defunct or not reported?
- The measurements appear to be biased toward Europe and the Americas since products like Tencent’s QQ, with roughly four times Skype’s active user base, are dramatically undercounted.
Ignore nuance: Just look at that huge block of red. Roughly two out of three IM clients will be Microsoft’s. What does that mean for consumers? To competitors?
Does the desktop IM market still matter? Yes.
Desktop IM has been Skype’s gateway drug for eight years. It was the most straightforward way to bring friends in to your contact list and download the codecs and other software needed for voice and video. Ringing, alerting and other attention-grabbers make realtime desktop apps successful.
That is changing. Standalone desktop IM apps will lose share over the next three years to browser, tablet and mobile apps. HTML5 and WebRTC are becoming real and platform makers are baking live calling into browsers and operating systems.
For now, desktops remain how most people IM most of the time. And Microsoft will soon own that market.
Full chart is below the fold…
Full Story »
Jim Courtney has a complete report on the European Commission’s review of the merger. News early next month but Jim works through how they’ll get there. Think the Commish will call for public comment? Is Microskype good for telecoms competition in Europe? What do Europe’s big telcos have to say? Is Skype a bigger threat on its own or with Microsoft’s backing?
Beecher Tuttle speculated Skype bought the assets of group text startup 3Jam. Skype’s texting features are… uninspiring? Hiring 3Jam’s Enlai Chu might fix that. Or is it feature creep?
CallByText compromises Skype security, requiring your Skype name and password, setting you up for identity theft. (Thanks, Hudson)
Reuters reports Google and Facebook talked about buying Skype. They didn’t talk to each other, although that would be interesting. Like this is something new? Skype’s corporate affairs folks must talk to potential buyers, if only to understand a non-IPO deal space.
Transit Telecom screws Brazilian Skype users, cancelling Números Online Skype, using the service since January 2006.
Sony firmware update adds Skype to Bravia TVs.
3CX adds Skype Connect to its Windows PBX software.
Azerbaijan minister wants to ban Skype as a security risk. via Tamada Tales.
Ubergizmo unboxes the Logitech TV Cam for Skype. “At CES 2011, Skype on TV was a huge hit, particularly among seniors. I’ve never seen so many seemingly retired people at CES, and they were almost all excited by this.”
Mumbai police analyze Skype calls to find gangsters.
Australian Skype for Vodafone mobile users will pay $3 monthly for Skype-to-Skype calls. Cheaper than previous plans.
California “elder law” attorneys to bill for Skype consultations. “…legal documents professionally produced in a virtual law firm environment.”
MyChelle Dermaceuticals licensed estheticians to bill for Skype consultations. “MyChelle’s expert team is on-hand to provide professional, effective treatment and skin care recommendations with a custom selection of pure, clean MyChelle Dermaceuticals products.”
Skype’s Skytools framework used to “construct a large fault-tolerant cluster of PostgreSQL.” Hundreds in production. Skytools.
Patch to Skype for Mac zero day vulnerability coming next week.
More ISPs now charge fortunes for blowing your bandwidth cap. Netflix.ca now lets you choose a lower quality video stream for one-third the bandwidth consumption. While Skype automatically adjusts your quality to fit available CPU, bandwidth, and connectivity, would it make sense to offer a bandwidth-conserving user preference for lower resolution video?
Irrawaddy reports Burma’s Myanmar Posts and Telecommunication (MPT) ordered a stop to competitive over-the-top services.  From the order: “The increasing use of the VoIP overseas calls via the Internet services such as Skype, G [Google] Talk, Pfingo, VZO, etc. given by PACs [Public Access Centers] and cyber cafés have caused official overseas calls through the [junta's] communication services to decline, affecting state revenue.” The real target seems to be Singapore’s StarHub Pfingo, hugely popular for talking with Burmese expats via email, IM, and voice on PCs and mobiles.
 Artificial scarcity produces monopoly profits. Especially in markets without (real) competition. So AT&T (T), one of a handful of landline and mobile broadband providers in the US, will cap residential DSL and charge for overages. The cap: 150 GB or 250GB depending on the plan; the penalty, $1 for 5 GB.
I love Karl Bode’s conclusions:
“… the heavy user of today is inevitably the standard user of tomorrow.”
“There’s several questions reporters and consumers should now ask, such as whether such overages would be possible in truly competitive markets, or if AT&T has any raw data proving this kind of action is truly necessary.”
“The over-arching question however is: does AT&T scale these caps and overages to accommodate for the dropping cost of bandwidth and hardware moving forward, or do they bend to inevitable investor pressure and continually tighten the metered billing noose?”
Skype voice calls, even large conference calls, don’t use much tube. With more than 40% of all Skype calls including video, look at your webcam. Video calls and screen sharing chew up the bits. Group video calls, more so. High quality and Hi Def video will burn through your artificially set quota before you know it.
On the wireless side, Verizon and AT&T’s new data prices charge $7.50 to $12.50 per gigabyte. A movie can easily run 0.7 gigs.
Times are tough in the United States but it’s good to know our elected congress can count on big telephone companies for contributions and a “pro-business” point of view.
I’ve loved MetroPCS for years, a breath of competitive fresh air in an oligopolic mobile industry. They innovate on pricing and contract terms to make mobile service more affordable for millions in America’s cities. Now they’re blocking Skype. Ouch. Are Skype bits more expensive than YouTube bits? Can MetroPCS hold Skype bits ransom for $20 more each month? Is MetroPCS sharing that extra money with Skype?
In other words, MetroPCS wants to get paid when you use Skype, even though you’ve already paid for the Internet access.
But wait! You didn’t! They never sell you the "Internet," just the "web." Most people use the two words interchangeably. MetroPCS hopes you don’t notice they’re blocking huge swaths of the Internet. Hmmm, do "advertising" and "fraud" mean the same thing?
I want MetroPCS and other internet providers to be great dumb pipes. Great by moving my data fast, cleanly, reliably. Dumb like a post office that doesn’t look inside my envelope when they deliver my parcels. Isenbergian "dumb pipes" mean I can trust a carrier to judge my bits by the skin of my packets, not their content.
MetroPCS can’t be trusted to censor the Internet; I don’t know them well enough. Do you trust them to decide which bits are OK for you and which aren’t? I don’t trust my own government to restrict my freedoms; why should I trust a phone company?
Action Items:
A. MetroPCS:
- Play with caps, throttling, and price tiers.
- Don’t discriminate on the content or source of bits.
- Announce MetroPCS supports mobile net neutrality and mobile Carterphone.
B. FCC, here’s your test case. Dig in and aggressively support mobile network neutrality.
C. FTC, truth in advertising? Comparable product labels so consumers what they buy, what’s left out, and how that compares to the market.
UPDATE: 56% of Oaklanders voted no on Measure W, which would have taxed phone lines and mobile phone service. This leaves Oakland the only major Bay Area city without a phone tax. Oaklanders passed Measure BB 70% to 30%, a local property tax measure. Message: don’t tax our phones.
Measure W: To support vital city services including public safety, library services, and parks and recreation, shall the Oakland Municipal Code be amended to establish a telephone “access line” tax at a rate of $1.99 per month per access line and $13 per month per “trunk line” will proceeds placed in the City’s General Fund subject to annual audits?
Like Skype itself, US cities see phone service as a pool of money to tap. Skype will have to grow at least a few order of magnitude before it becomes a specific target for government revenue. Let’s see if the new law’s language covers Skype.
The law defines a few of the terms:
"Access line" means any connection from a customer within the geographic boundaries of the City of Oakland to a supplier of telephone service offered to the public for compensation. "Access line" includes, but is not limited to, connections providing residential basic exchange service, business basic exchange service, PBX service (private branch exchange), foreign exchange service, and Centrex service. "Access line" also includes a connection from a single mobile telephone to a commercial mobile radio service, as defined in Section 20.3 of Title 47 of the Code of Federal Regulations as this section existed on October 1, 2002, which has as its place of primary use, as defined in the Mobile Telecommunications Sourcing Act, 4 U.S.C. Section 124(8), a location within the City of Oakland.
So landline service and mobile service.
It defines providers:
"Service supplier" means any person supplying a telephone access line to any telephone communications service subscriber at a location within the City of Oakland. Service suppliers may include, without limitation, local exchange carriers, inter-exchange carriers, competitive access providers, cable television providers offering telecommunications services, suppliers of wireless telephone service, and any other entity offering direct connections between their premises and the premises of telephone communications service subscribers.
"Telephone corporation" shall have the same meaning as defined in Section 234 of the Public Utilities Code of the State of California, or the most comparable successor definition. It also includes any person providing wireless telephone service to any telephone communications service subscriber.
Skype isn’t offering wireless or landline “telephone service.”
"Telephone service" means access to a telephone system, providing two-way telephonic quality communication with substantially all persons having telephone or radio telephone stations constituting a part of such telephone system, whether or not such service uses transmission wires. For the purposes of the tax imposed by this Article, a person shall be construed to subscribe to "telephone service" within the City of Oakland if he or she has a "place of primary use" as such term is defined in the Mobile Telecommunications Sourcing Act, 4 U.S.C. Sec the City of Oakland. "Telephone service" does not include any system that is expressly excluded from the definition of "access line" or "trunk line."
Skype is probably in the clear, for now.
 I’d expect major cities to start adding VoIP taxes soon, especially where there is proof that your system touches the public phone network. As phone tax revenue falls with the switch from landlines to VoIP and mobile, governments will follow the money. The administrative costs for Skype could be huge, delighting incumbent telcos.
Vote early and often.
Measure W endorsements.
photo: King157 TDK WCF RTM TMF Oakland Yards by anarchosyn.
Call me at +1-510-343-5664, Skype me, follow @SkypeJournal and @evanwolf. Visit our Skype Journal private technologist roundtable, one of the longest running public Skype chats.
Today is Supernova Perestroika. Wishing I could be there.
Don’t use the content of my bits to treat my bits differently than anyone else’s bits. That’s the general thrust of network neutrality. Common carriage, that the companies moving my phone call or video call or email shouldn’t know or care about who I’m speaking with or what we’re saying.
Net neutrality came up as Internet service providers struggled to do more than move data.  They blocked Skype, throttled movie downloads, filtered out websites. They decided it was their right to choose on behalf of their customers since they owned access points to the Internet.
Skype and other Internet companies that suffer from bad carrier behavior supported net neutrality for a long time. Skype’s chief D.C. advocate, Chris Libertelli, recently shot the FCC a note: “The issue of Network Neutrality protections for Skype users has been pending for too long. Skype supports quick action by the FCC and today’s vote. Moving forward with a solid legal foundation is critical to promoting investment and consumer choice throughout the Internet ecosystem."
I bring this up because Skype soft-launched SkypeKit last month. SkypeKit lets programmers build Skype inside desktop software and in hardware. Like Apple‘s app store, Skype limits what you can build based on the content of your app: no adult content, no gambling.
Skype claims this right because your SkypeKit app will use some of Skype’s resources. Copies of your app will log in to Skype’s servers and move data through them. SkypeKit-based apps use proprietary Skype intellectual property, like Skype-built communication protocols, codecs, and encryption. Their turf, at least in part, so their rules.
Skype reserves the right to compel you to withdraw your published product from the market if they decide, at their own convenience, that your app violates their content sensibilities. Should they have this power?
Just as the power companies can’t dictate what kinds of purposes people use electricity for, the providers of basic general-purpose communications transport shouldn’t be able to dictate how we communicate. – Susan Crawford, August 14, 2008
Professor Crawford wrote that about network neutrality. Her point seems to apply here. Infrastructure shouldn’t dictate the content of solutions built upon it. Public roads what models of car you can drive. Cars where you can go. Application platforms what you can run.
Should Skype, arguably a phone company and offering a telecommunications platform, have the right in law to discriminate based on the content of your conversation? How about other cloud telephony and cloud platform providers, like Voxeo, Google, and Amazon? We know they have the technical power to enforce their view. Should those powers be supported in law and regulation too?
At what point do the ideas of common or public carriage apply to non-telephony platforms?
"Common carriage was applied to freight or carriage companies and inland and ocean water carriers. By common law, common carriers were 1) required to serve upon reasonable demand, any and all who sought out their services; 2) held to a high standard of care for the property entrusted to them; and 3) limited to incidental damages for breach of duty." — Eli M. Noam, Beyond Liberalization II: The Impending Doom of Common Carriage, 18 Telecomm. Pol’y 435. Sec. II (1994). via Cybertelecom
Serve everyone.
How is carrying our voice bits different than executing our application bits?
Should Apple be compelled to let all apps run on iOS? Should Amazon be indifferent about the apps that run in its cloud so long as they behave non-destructively within technical guidelines?
Should the Carterphone principle (attach any phone to a network so long as it doesn’t harm the network) apply to all APIs by default? Attach any app or service so long as it doesn’t harm network operations?
Should this apply to all platforms? Apple and Amazon are big, successful, market leaders with their platforms. How about a small CAD company without power in a crowded market? Should we consider the long tail of API providers to be common carriers?
How about platforms that are in early testing, where the hosting company is not ready to make a public commitment to the APIs or to the platform? Skype’s SkypeKit platform is in an early closed beta and its APIs are still in flux. Should we exempt early-stage platforms from discriminating on the content of our software?
If software publishing is protected speech,
By whose authority?
Being privately owned isn’t a free pass. Skype answers to its board of directors, not to the public. Then again, so does AT&T. The public doesn’t get to say that my dating site is "adult" except through public discussion. Why should AT&T at the carrier layer or Skype at the application layer?
What constitutes a public interest worthy of taking some authority away from those hosting a platform? Free speech, consumer choice, freedom to assemble (online), access to work (online and off), access to government services and ePolitics? What regulator would have the authority to impose open access? What laws cover this now?
Lots of questions.
One last one.
Should Apple and Skype, both of whom are dictating content on their network, lose exemption from DMCA Safe Harbor provisions? Does restricting some content make them liable for the content they approve?
No more questions.
Courts around the world told Microsoft they had to play fair in the Windows browser wars. Let’s debate application neutrality for our new platforms.
 Skype has been flexible on privacy when it comes to major markets. Skype’s China software, distributed through a TOM-Skype joint venture, censors text chats and enables government monitoring. Skype mobile for Verizon Wireless in the US is CALEA compliant, offering contact and call records and live intercepts to American law enforcement and intelligence agencies. India’s government wants similar powers, per an India Times report. The Department of Telecommunications (DoT) will give an ultimatum to RIM, Skype and Google to provide access to conversations within and across India’s borders. A Skype spokesperson told me today they haven’t received a message or directive from the DoT.
From a Reuters report:
The NTRA had tolerated mobile internet telephony until a drop in international call volumes over recent months pushed them to tell Egypt’s operators to enforce the ban, Badawy said.
"We monitor what is happening on international voice calling and it has had an adverse effect on it," he said by phone.
Tarek responds to a Global Voices post:
It’s official now, the NTRA – the government – is the one responsible for this and not the mobile operators. However I have strong feelings that the operators are the one who pushed the NTRA to take such decision in the first place as Skype harms their – as well as Telecom Egypt’s – revenues.
Guest post by Shahul Hameed, broadband analyst at VAC Media. Shahul reports on UK broadband provider performance, technologies, and markets for VAC’s Broadband Suppliers site.
Will instant downloads ever happen here? Can we play online and watch videos without interruption? We have been expecting these changes with our UK broadband services a long time.
A recent study by Broadband Suppliers states our international peers, especially South Korea and Japan, are miles a head of the United Kingdom. Even though the UK ranks among the top thirty richest nations, the UK’s telecommunication infrastructure is worse than rest of Europe and most of the countries in the world.
South Korea, for example, is the first country in the world to bring fiber optic cable connections to every school nationwide. Online games are a national event.
The maximum broadband speed offered in UK is 50 Mbps while the average monthly bill shoots up to 10 times higher than other countries. Expert analysis claims houses in most part of the country still connect to exchanges using old BT copper wires. Copper wires do not have better data carrying capacity compared to fiber optic cables. Moreover, the longer the wires are from the exchange, the slower the speed will be. The fiber optic cables have been laid in major cities while other parts of the country still wait for network expansion.
The Broadband Stakeholder Group (BSG) recently announced that the UK is worse on broadband penetration by standard measures. They also reported that one in every five users (21%) express dissatisfaction with broadband speeds. 16% are dissatisfied with the price of the plan and 13% with the reliability and performance of the connection. Almost 26% of customers say broadband providers set a wrong expectation about connection speed.
Some of the major factors affecting speeds include:
- Line capacity of the ISP’s
- Cable quality
- Distance between the residents and exchange
Awareness about the speed of the broadband is mixed. Many people are well informed about the factors affecting speed and choose the fastest ISP, while almost 40% are unaware of the head line speed. Broadband suppliers continue to mislead the public regarding download speeds and tag customers with higher prices. This was also reported and criticized by Ofcom this year.
The UK Government should speed up the process of laying fiber optic cables and increase the coverage of wireless networks. Else we will remain in the 26th position or fall further when it comes to the quality of broadband service in the world, while competitors like Japan and South Korea are future ready.
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