It has been quite widely reported that Panama decided to order local ISPs to block a serie of UDP ports.

It has everybody all stirred up. Do they realize that VoIP services are illegal in one form or the other in many many countries? Interconnection rates for international connections make outgoing calls from these countries a very lucrative business for incumbent carriers and any technology that allows to avoid those rates is not welcome.

The ITU actually has some interesting stats in it IP telephony report from 2001. Just for fun, in 2000, IP telephony (including IP fax) at large was prohibited in too many countries to retype here, from Albania to Zimbabwe, including India, Cuba, Morroco, Nigeria, Romania,Estonia, Cameroon, Argentina, etc. Not all third world countries as you can notice. Those countries usually have a big imbalance in outgoing vs incoming calls and use settlement rates to make a pretty penny, which mind you has a better chance to help the development of the telecom infrastructure in those countries than giving money to a private ISP, but that’s an other debate. Other countries had various restrictions on IP telephony services, from Israel, Mexico, South Africa, Egypt and many others,

No words however on the technical measures used by those administrations to enforce those restrictions. But I have a feeling that the Panama case is not unique. So the whole question of the accessibility of VoIP services is interesting. Blocking ports will not be a fully effective solution yet allowing free competition in those markets may not be the smartest thing in all cases.

I don’t favor such solutions, but you have to ask yourself, can’t a country decided what goes on in the cables (or the spectrum) on it’s territory? AFAIK. there is no multilateral Internet convention that would declare that the IETF protocols are a monolithic package. The US is not shy of enforcing the DMCA against foreign nationals. The RIAA is throwing as much junk as possible into the P2P networks in an effort to make them less efficient on a worldwide scale. So who can honestly scream bloody murder about Panama trying to control the use of certain services for it’s local users?