FCC Eyes Google Voice’s Rural Call Blocking

Last week, twenty members of Congress sided with AT&T and asked the Federal Communications Commission to take a good look at Google Voice, because the free telephony service doesn’t allow users to call certain rural numbers. Two days later, Sharon Gillett, chief of the FCC’s Wireline Competition Bureau, sent Google telecom counsel a list of questions about their service.

Aside from the obvious anti-competition motive, AT&T is in a tizzy over Voice because GV really does prevent users from calling certain rural exchanges because the fees for phone companies for calls that end there are up to 100 times those of other areas. Google Telecom Counsel Richard Whitt posted on the Google Public Policy blog:

The reason we restrict calls to certain local phone carriers’ numbers is simple. Not only do they charge exorbitant termination rates for calls, but they also partner with adult sex chat lines and “free” conference calling centers to drive high volumes of traffic. This practice has been called “access stimulation” or “traffic pumping” (clearly by someone with a sense of humor). Google Voice is a free application and we want to keep it that way for all our users — which we could not afford to do if we paid these ludicrously high charges.

Google’s underlying argument is that their service is add-on to existing phone services, not a replacement. They say that they shouldn’t be subject to the same regulations as the phone companies that charge for service and build the infrastructure.

AT&T claims that Google is acting as a telecom (not, as they claim, an application), and should be subject to the same rules and regulations—specifically the neutrality rules. While it’s no surprise to see AT&T and Google on opposite sides of a neutrality battle, the roles they’re cast in this time are at least a little humorous—Google as the one trying to restrict access and AT&T as the fair-minded, open-access alternative.

What do you think? Should Google Voice be subject to the same regulations as other telecos? Or are they splitting hairs when they claim they’re exempt?

OpenX Raises Another $10M to Help in Its Efforts to Bring Down Google

It seems that OpenX CEO Tim Cadogan is doing something that he struggled to do at Yahoo–compete with Google.

The ad technology provider and marketplace has just announced a third round of venture capital with $10.4 million being added to the war chest, courtesy of DAG Ventures.

The company is certainly doing well to fend off Google’s own Ad Manager product–claiming an impressive 300 billion ads monthly on more than 150,000 websites across the web. The money will help OpenX further expand both the downloadable and hosted versions of its ad server, while continuing to grow its recently launched OpenX Market.

So, how is this small start-up able to stand head-to-head with the search giant? Simple. OpenX isn’t trying to fight Google on its strengths.

The threat of Google’s entry into the sector has prompted OpenX to tout its independence, neutrality and openness as distinguishing features, although Cadogan stressed that its ad server product is also more customizable than Google’s. “We couldn’t outspend them, so we’re trying to create a different value proposition,” he said.

Sounds like a good plan. In fact, with more and more start-ups taking the same approach, it makes you wonder if Google could end up the way of Gulliver.