Google told the Federal Communications Commission on Wednesday that it has developed an engineering work-around that allows it to switch off selected telephone numbers to prevent Google Voice users from calling adult chat lines and other high-cost "traffic-pumping" services. The search giant noted that such services disproportionately raise Google's operating costs for the free service, which is currently available by invitation only.
"We went to work on this fix because earlier this year, we noticed an extremely high number of calls were being made to an extremely small number of destinations," said Google Counsel Richard Whitt. "In fact, the top 10 telephone prefixes -- the area code plus the first three digits of a seven-digit number -- generated more than 160 times the expected traffic volumes."
Under 100 Numbers Blocked
Google Voice provides users with a single telephone number for managing all inbound calls to the user's wireline and/or wireless telephone numbers and devices. The fledgling service also enables users to forward incoming calls to selected phones, receive SMS messages, and have incoming voice-mail messages automatically converted to text.
To avoid traffic-pumping schemes, Google Voice initially restricted calls to certain telephone prefixes. "But over the past few weeks, we've been looking at ways to do this on a more granular level," Whitt said.
Google Voice currently restricts calls to fewer than 100 specific phone numbers, all of which Google says it has good reason to believe are engaged in traffic pumping. According to Whitt, many of these businesses are located in rural areas with local carriers that charge unusually high rates for terminating traffic.
Previously, about 1.1 percent of the monthly traffic through Google Voice accounted for 26.2 percent of the free service's monthly U.S. cost, Whitt noted. "So in August 2009 Google Voice began the practice of restricting calls to certain high-cost destinations," he told the FCC.
In its legal notice to Google Voice users, Google expressly reserves the right to restrict calls or connections to any telephone numbers. "These may include, but are not limited to, certain geographic locations, special-services numbers, satellite telephony services, and other call-forwarding services," the notice says.
A Pressing Need For Reform
Whitt objected to charges that Google Voice should be prohibited from blocking calls to selected telephone numbers and exchanges, as the regulations governing traditional telecommunications services currently require.
"Google Voice is not a telecommunications service under the Federal Communications Act," Whitt said. "As an information service" it "offers users a capability for generating, acquiring, storing and transforming information of the user's choosing" and "is not associated with an underlying telephone access service," he said.
The statutory definition of a telecommunications service is that it encompasses services offered for a fee, Whitt noted. "Google Voice, however, is free to users, including all outbound domestic calling," he said.
Moreover, the regulations only pertain to telecommunications services offered "to the public, or to such classes of users as to be effectively available directly to the public," Whitt said. He added that Google Voice currently is being offered solely on an invitation basis.
Although Google has developed a fix to address the traffic-pumping problem, Whitt said the bottom line is that the FCC needs to repair the nation's broken carrier-compensation system. "The current system simply does not serve consumers well, and these types of schemes point up the pressing need for reform," Whitt said.
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