Thaindian News

WASHINGTON, D.C. (BNO NEWS) – The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has opened an investigation into alleged Google Voice calling restrictions, the agency said on Friday. Google immediately replied on its blog.

Sharon Gillett, chief of the FCC’s Wireline Competition Bureau, wrote a letter to Google Senior Policy Director Richard Whitt in which she requested answers to a number of questions regarding Google Voice.

“Recent reports indicate that Google’s Google Voice service restricts calling from consumers to certain rural communities. In light of pending Commission proceedings regarding concerns about so called “access stimulation,” the Commission’s prohibition on call blocking by carriers, as well as the Commission’s interest in ensuring that “broadband networks are widely deployed, open, affordable, and accessible to all consumers, we are interested in gathering facts that can provide a more complete understanding of this situation,” Gillett wrote to Whitt.

Gillett asked Whitt to respond no later than October 28 to a series of questions. Among the questions asked, Gillett asked which telephone numbers, if any, are blocked by Google Voice and asked for a description of the technological means by which those restrictions are implemented.

Gillett also asked if Google Voice competes with any services classified as telecommunications services and if it sells any telecommunication services.

“How does Google identify the telephone numbers to which it restricts calls? Does it restrict calls to individual telephone numbers, or to particular exchanges or NPA-NXXs? Why does Google Voice restrict calls to those numbers?,” Gillett asked. She also asked if Google has any contracts with third parties to obtain inputs for its service, such as access to telephone numbers, transmission of telephone calls, and interconnection with local telephone networks.

Richard Whitt was quick to reply to Gillett’s letter, by doing so on the company’s blog. “The reason we restrict calls to certain local phone carriers’ numbers is simple. Not only do they charge exorbitant termination rates for calls, but they also partner with adult sex chat lines and “free” conference calling centers to drive high volumes of traffic,” Whitt wrote. “This practice has been called “access stimulation” or “traffic pumping” (clearly by someone with a sense of humor). Google Voice is a free application and we want to keep it that way for all our users — which we could not afford to do if we paid these ludicrously high charges,” he said.

Whitt says the complaint to the FCC was filed by AT&T, who, according to Whitt, requested the FCC in the past for permission to block calls to the same rural areas which Google Voice is restricting. “Why? For exactly the same reasons we restrict them — the exorbitant termination rates. Of course, AT&T charges customers for their services and also receives hundreds of millions of dollars in universal service subsidies,” Whitt said.