The government is finalising a proposal to bring companies that provide Internet Telephony under the ambit of the ISP license. This means that Yahoo!, MSN, Skype, Net2phone and others would have to pay a service tax of 12.24% and a revenue share of 6%. If the companies pass this on to the consumers, expect tariffs to increase. More at The Economic Times.
For now, VoIP service providers are being classified as ISP’s, and this is a form of protectionism. At the Open Source Convention in Delhi in August, I’d spoken to Eben Moglen, the general council of the Free Software Foundation, and he mentioned a free VoIP software called Asterisk which he feels is going to send the fixedline operators across the world to the cleaners. However, it does require a T1 line to operate, so I haven’t been able to try it. I wonder what the government is going to do if we’re able to use it here. How will they tax a free service?
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