China Firm Wants Internet Calls Blocked

Big business can be intrusive - especially when that big business is run by your government. Even more so when your government is China. Peter Svensson of the Associated Press (via The Seattle Post-Intelligencer) writes:

A U.S. maker of network management systems said Wednesday it had received an order from Shanghai Telecom Co. for a system that can detect and block telephone calls placed over the Internet.

Shanghai Telecom, which has 6.2 million landlines, plans to use Narus Inc.’s system to improve its ability to block “unauthorized” Internet calls that connect to its phone system, bypassing its toll structure.

Use of Internet calling, also known as Voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP, is growing quickly across the world, threatening the business models of some telephone companies.

In the United States, the Federal Communications Commission fined a small telephone company that prevented its Internet subscribers from accessing competing VoIP service, but some countries with state-owned telecommunications companies are taking a different tack.

In China, the government has sided with carriers and allowed them to block VoIP services that compete with the carrier’s own products. A recent report in the Financial Times quoted an executive with a Hong Kong company as saying that the government would not issue new licenses for computer-to-phone calling services until 2008…