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Comment by sologoub | Hacker News Reader

That's great, but telecom is still agaist GAE ToS:

"4.3 Restrictions. Customer will not, and will not allow third parties under its control to: (f) use the Service to operate or enable any telecommunications service or in connection with any Application that allows End Users to place calls to or to receive calls from any public switched telephone network;"

Source: https://developers.google.com/appengine/terms

A question was asked about this a few months back and a GAE PM basically said use it at your own risk. Here's the thread: https://groups.google.com/d/topic/google-appengine/c8u71g5Cc...

Hopefully, this is a signal that they want to sort this out...

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To be frank, Twilio's service doesn't constitute a regulated telephony service, which is why Google allows them on the platform.

If Twilio integration would expose them to Telco regulation, you better believe it would never happen.

I agree the wording above is poor and could use a rewrite, but I wanted to articulate what Google is afraid of: being classified as subject to CALEA.

Right. My guess is that with services like Twilio, CALEA provisions are fulfilled via the carriers themselves. Any thoughts on that?

They're fulfilled by what we in the biz call "upstream providers". Companies like AT&T, Verizon and Level3.

What distinguishes a telecom company from an Internet company is surprisingly vague. Many in the industry say it's the process of selling Two-Way SIP connectivity that gets you, others say its colo'ing gear inside of a ILEC.

As in all things telecom, consult your lawyer.

Google Groups website is broken, so that thread is not readable.

Seems to work fine for me... but here's the response:

"Re: [google-appengine] Re: TOS question - may I add a dial button

Hello All,

Please take my comment as a comment and not legal guidance as any legal guidance needs to come from your own legal counsel based on our terms of service. But, that clause is in our ToS as App Engine is not built to be or regulated as a telecommunication service and as such anyone who would fall under telecommunication regulations would likely not pass an audit. I know that sounded cryptic but I'm trying to be as precise as possible without telling you what to do :)

I hope that helps and I hope you'll understand if you want more clarification it might be hard to give,

Greg D'Alesandre Senior Product Manager, Google App Engine"

Did we miss the sunsetting announcement for that Google service? /s

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