India outlaws Skype, Yahoo and others
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India is opened to foreign investments — but has also economical protectionism. The Indian Department of Telecommunications outlaws Skype, Yahoo, Vonage and some other foreign VoIP providers. None of them are paying the 12% service tax and 6% revenue share on IP telephony that local, licensed operators fork out. The result: Some 30 million minutes untaxed. The result of the result: A partial ban, foreign softphones are prohibited to sell their services to Indian businesses.
But there’s a second reason for this sentence. Calling applications are said to bring a “serious security threat as they did not come under any Indian regulator and policy framework,” according to the India Times quoting official sources.
Either way, India is joining the group formed by China, South Korea, Taiwan. IP telephony is great, but implicitly elbows local telecoms competitors. They’re emerging, still too weak to resist to international pressure, so in a classic move, governments surfaces market protectionism.
Dec 8, 2006 | By Nuno
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