Our own Jeff Pulver has been sounding the alarm for the VoIP industry on the FCC's latest how-can-we-please-you-AT&T move, an "interim" order that uses the idea of USF payments as a club to VoIP business plans. The quick take is that the 150-page-plus order will undo most of the "light touch" regulatory stance toward VoIP, replacing it with legacy telecom taxation burdens for the sole reason of covering an expected coming shortfall in the USF budget.

While Jeff (with the assistance of Pulver.com wartime consigliere Jonathan Askin, our man in D.C.) has detailed the main outrageous points of the pending order here, don't just take his word for it. The telco analysts at Stifel, Nicolaus (which include former FCC chief of staff Blair Levin) recapped the order in a recent research note by calling the interim rules "more problematic for VoIP providers than advertised, complicating their ability to avoid regulatory traffic assumptions that providers believe will inflate their payments."

(That's "more problematic" as in the way your car-repair payments become "more problematic" when the garage owner tells you "the problem isn't just a loose screw, it's something somewhere in the transmission." For VoIP providers, the potential bill just got a lot bigger.)

Great -- let's cut off innovation by saddling it with fees that perpetuate the old monopoly models of business. Dan Berninger, in a guest post on Jeff's blog, argues against the recent order and USF in general at length here. Worth a read to get your bearings.

What's especially interesting about the latest order is that it seems (according to Jeff Pulver's reading) to eliminate some of the protection of VoIP from state-by-state regulation that many thought was already decided in VoIP's favor with the Nov. 2004 Vonage order.

After that order came out, an industry source noted that current FCC chairman (then just a commissioner) was the only commissioner not to release a statement (scroll down to Nov. 12) about the Vonage order. Perhaps because he knew he'd try to change it in the future, so he didn't want any words to use against him? Lawyers and conspiracy theorists, start your billable hours.