Following up on my recent post about about placing calls from with GMail, there is a need to clarify some issues and explore others.
First off, I received some clarification from a Google spokesperson:
The call phones feature in Gmail will generate revenue through international calling. We’re not using this feature to sell ads, and have no plans to do so.
I understand that Google is not planning to make use of personal call data to place ads, including use of location information or destination of your calls to place ads either. Google is not listening in on the phone conversations, and it does not record them, contrary to what you may have read elsewhere.
A history of calls made from your computer gets logged, but users will need to log-in in order to see this history, which enables users to view, manage, and delete this history from google.com/voice. When you delete the call history, Google anonymizes the data so it has no way of knowing who placed which calls.
We can leave these privacy types of issues to others to pursue; we will watch to see if there will be commitments from Google to hold to these initial design principles.
I have not yet heard back from Google regarding a registration with the CRTC as a Telecommunications Service Provider (TSP). From what I have seen, it certainly appears that Google is offering its international voice service to the public in order to generate revenue on a per minute basis – a pretty conventional long distance business model. As such, one would expect that Google should be registered as a TSP and apply for a Basic International Telecommunications Services (BITS) License. The same holds for Skype and others in this business.
A Basic International Telecommunications Services (BITS) licensee is an entity that the CRTC has authorized to carry telecommunications traffic between Canada and another country. All Facilities-Based Providers and those Non-Facilities Based Providers that carry telecommunications traffic internationally must obtain a BITS licence.
These filing requirements ensure that all service providers are subjected to the same regulations, including contributions to the universal service fund and CRTC data collection.
An examination of Table 5.2.1 of the CRTC’s 2010 Communications Monitoring Report seems to indicate there may be a lot of missing minutes. In 2005, long distance minutes grew by 10% – about 6 billion minutes – over 2004, In 2006, the growth rate was about 8%. But the last 3 years have seen virtually no growth – even a modest contraction in long distance minutes.
Some of this traffic is exempt computer-to-computer substitution. But do any of us believe that there is really less long distance calling today than there was 5 years ago? Where did those minutes go?
While some may disagree with the universal service subsidy mechanism, the CRTC needs to ensure that all of the industry participants are playing by the same set of rules and sharing equally in the costs.