The particular hearing that set this all off is the Senate Commerce Committee's review of S.2281 ("VoIP Regulatory Freedom Act") that took place on last Wednesday, and in general, the hearing has a higher content to noise ratio than the resulting press coverage. The agenda and statements of the participants can be found here: <http://commerce.senate.gov/hearings/witnesslist.cfm?id=1230> S.2281 takes the middle of the road position in areas such as lawful intercept, universal service fund, and E911. At a high-level, those VoIP services which offer PSTN interconnection (and thereby look like traditional phone service in terms of capabilities) under S.2281 pick up the same regulatory requirements. Those VoIP services which do not interconnect are continue to be treated as "information services" and therefore excluded from these requirements. With respect to facilitating lawful intercept, the opening comments of Ms. Laura Parsky (Deputy Assistant Attorney General, US DoJ) and James Dempsey, Executive Director of the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) are quite informative. The DoJ view is that S.2281 is not enough, and any service using switching or transport should facilitate lawful intercept. This position has the advantage of clarity, but there are lots of communications (chat/IM/etc) that are going to hard to decode and make readily available as needed. It is also an expansion of the current framework of CALEA, which specifically sets aside information services including email and messaging. The CDT position is interesting, noting that CALEA came into being to address concerns that law enforcement wouldn't be able to readily pursue lawful intercept orders without directly mandating call intercept capacity in each service provider. This works fine with one application (voice) but that replicating this model for data services makes no sense given the diversity of Internet communications applications. CDT proposes that if law enforcement really needs better intercept capabilities for data applications, it should work on its own decode capabilities or get service bureaus to handle that same, and that the Internet service providers shouldn't have to do anything other supply a copy of the relevant users raw packet stream... Despite the angst on both sides, requiring just those VoIP services which look like traditional phone service (due to PSTN interconnection) as requiring ready lawful intercept capacity will result in the equivalent situation as we have today with CALEA, and appears to be the likely outcome of the debate. Apologies for length, /John