The Triumph of VoIP Could Spell Doom for Voice

[Commentary] Voice calling has been the engine of profit for the telcos for a century, and most of it has been old-fashioned switched voice -- what's called "plain old telephone service" (POTS). When VoIP was first introduced, everybody predicted that voice on the Internet would destroy the old POTS model. Now, with even service providers buying VoIP companies, it looks like that's about to happen. And the changes on the Internet could be profound. Imagine for a moment that your voice services were all replaced by Skype or a similar service. If you open your calling to everyone, you can expect zillions of telemarketing calls with no hope of relief, because regulators can't trace or even authenticate the user names. Same with harassing calls. And if you call 911, maybe somebody will come -- maybe even to the location where you made the call -- but you probably can't be certain. Forget wiretaps on criminals and potential terrorists, because there's no guarantee lawful intercept will work. Nobody is going to tolerate this sort of thing, but that's what the future would look like if we simply transferred our voice calls to current IP-based services without additional steps and safeguards. To get some protection, we'd have to regulate these new voice services.