Indian government is in news again. First it banned blogs and now is the turn of VoIP. Unlicensed VoIP telephony is facing the wrath of Indian government. The reason is pretty obvious - the government says that it is losing out on revenue as users are bypassing the service and revenue tax charged on standard calls. Besides this security issues are also being stated as a reason for taking this decision.

Now the government is asking various ISP providers regarding the details of VoIP usage and it is expected that the country would shut its door to foreign ISPs. You may see popular services such as Yahoo and Skype facing the axe in India. We have already seen lebanon pass a law which requires that no broadband provider can offer speeds faster than 32kbps.

DOT states that unlicensed service companies offer around thirty million minutes of VoIP per month to BPOs and KPOs in the country and this step is being touted as a means of taking care of the services which don't come under the purview of Indian regulators. To me this has some deeper connotations where the government is getting influenced by some of the private players who don't have the resources to compete with these low costs services and the government is taking this step under the guise of security and regulatory issues.