Google Defends, Scales Back Call Blocking

Google had been noncommittal on the proper classification of its VoIP service. FCC rules ban telecom service providers from blocking expensive phone calls as “self-help.” AT&T complained to the commission that Google Voice competes with conventional phone service and should come under the same rules. The carrier said differing treatment of Google and AT&T was inconsistent with the fourth principle of the FCC’s Internet policy statement, requiring fair competition among application providers.

“The Google effort to target specific parties for calling restrictions could ease some of the political heat surrounding the issue, particularly from rural lawmakers concerned about normal calls being blocked to their constituents,” Stifel Nicolaus said in a note Thursday, “but it doesn’t appear likely to end the AT&T network neutrality jabs.” AT&T didn’t respond right away to a request for comment.

“Whether Google decides to use a broadsword or a rapier to engage in call blocking is beside the point,” said Ross Buntrock, an Arent Fox attorney who represents FreeConferenceCall.com and several rural local exchange carriers whose calls are being blocked. Google Voice and services like it “take advantage of the nation’s ubiquitous” public switched telephone network “and numbering resources (through their CLEC vendors) to provide their ‘free’ services,” he said. But use of the network isn’t free, Buntrock said. “Perhaps Google should spend more time analyzing its business relationship with its underlying carriers and less time devising new ways to block its subscribers’ calls to services they clearly want.”

In the letter, Google said it couldn’t provide free service without blocking calls to some high-cost numbers. At first, the company cut off calls to destinations by phone- number prefix, but now it’s more particular, it said. “Google Voice now maintains a restricted list only for those specific telephone numbers that match our data filters, and appear to be associated with local carriers and associated businesses generating substantial in-bound traffic.”

Google said it started blocking numbers in August after “noticing extremely high cost calls to a concentrated number of destinations.” An internal investigation begun in June “revealed that the top 10 prefixes to U.S. destinations (NPA- NXX) accounted for 1.1 percent of our monthly U.S. traffic by volume -- an unusually large number, and some 161 times the expected amount by prefix.” The traffic is as expensive as 39 cents a minute and accounts for a large chunk of the cost of Google Voice, the company said.

Google said it explains which calls are blocked in legal notices on the Google Voice Web site. And it said the Google terms of service allow the company to change “the form and nature” of its services and end a service or feature without notifying users.

Google Voice doesn’t “compete with the telecommunications services offerings of carriers,” Google said. The service is free, by invitation only, and it requires a would-be user to “subscribe to one or more traditional telecommunications services,” it said. A major purpose of the app is to forward incoming calls simultaneously to multiple telecom services, such as a user’s home and work phones and cellphone, Google said. The service “complements those carrier services by allowing users to manage their telecommunications service better,” it said.

Google “Voice does not constitute resold ’telecommunications service,'” Google said. Like other information services, Voice “uses telecommunications obtained from certificated telecommunications carriers as inputs for the final and finished information service,” the company said. Voice isn’t interconnected VoIP, because it doesn’t require a the user to own a broadband connection or IP- capable equipment, Google said.

Public Knowledge believes Google made a sound argument that Voice isn’t a telecom service, said spokesman Art Brodsky. “Based on their description of the service, and the limited nature of it, it seems to make sense.”

Scott Cleland, Precursor’ president and long a critic of Google, criticized the company’s reasoning. “The essence of Google’s defense of why they should be able to discriminate indiscriminately as an information service provider, and broadband information service providers should not -- is that the FCC simply can trust Google to not abuse any special treatment by the FCC because they are only discriminating against about a hundred entities and they are only discriminating for good economic reasons.”