AT&T Goes After Google Voice

Live by the sword, die by the sword.

This is the danger of increasing regulation; the blade cuts both ways. You may think that Net Neutrality is about taking on big companies, but I guarantee that in just a few short years their smart legal teams will be using the regulation to increase each other's legal bills and to squash smaller competitors [1].

[1] Regulation is similar in this regard to patents. The defense of patents is always the hypothetical small inventor. In practice, though, the beneficiary always seems to be huge corporations (except for patent trolls, which are a fairly recent innovation).

interesting, but google voice is not a phone network connection alone. It is a bundled service with a web front-end. How would net neutrality be applicable in this case?

Google: "Unlike traditional carriers, Google Voice is a free, Web-based software application, and so not subject to common carrier laws."

I don't get how price or underlying technology figure in this. Almost all of the end-users won't see the difference between one system for making phonecalls and another, and I'm sure the rules are meant to protect exactly those people.

Why block? why not just tell the user he is calling an expensive line and charge him more for it?

This is the type of thing that bothers me about mandated net/carrier neutrality. It's all well and good in theory, but in practice it ends up restricting innovation and limits freedom. If people didn't like what Google Voice brought to the table, they simply wouldn't use it. All you get when you regulate something like this is yet another way to bludgeon the competition into submission.

I really hoped this headline meant that Google Voice had prompted AT&T to offer a similar useful service to its customers. But no, it just means that both players are lobbying congress for regulation favoring their particular business models.

Overall as AT&T states Google maybe breaking the fourth rule, but who cares I want innovation, free SMS, voice transcriptions read via email, ability to regulate who rings my phone vs. who goes to voicemail, web interface and etc, etc, etc...

Maybe it was AT&T all along blocking the iPhone app, as the executives probably have used Google VOice or use it and know it's a killer app. Well for me it is.