Pols Want FCC to Investigate Google Voice's Call Blocking
Oct 8, 2009, 11:39 AM by Eric M. Zeman
A number of lawmakers in the U.S. House of Representatives are petitioning the Federal Communication Commission to investigate Google Voice's practice of blocking calls to certain rural areas. Google Voice blocks calls to some 1-900 type services and other rural regions to cut down on expenses. It is illegal for telecom providers to block calls. The lawmakers involved call Google's practice "ill conceived and unfair to our rural constituents." Technically Google Voice is a call-forwarding service, but telecom companies believe it should have to abide by the same set of rules that they have to follow.
Comments
Still in beta....
If google was:
-Charging something for this service
-Marketing this product as "final" version
-offering service that wasn't dependent on a third party (either traditional telecom or internet)
they might have a case.
As it stands, it is these local telecoms charging insane disconnect fees.
The solution? Google should allow calls to these areas but consider them "international calls" and fund the disconnect fees that way. either that, or those companies should waive (or drop) the disconnect fees for GV users.
Forcing google to have calls go through to these companies (which means they will have to start charging for the service, or chan...
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