Intelligence Bureau asks Indian Govt to block Skype, VoIP services

Alex Jose — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 07:41:23 +0000

Indian Government has decided to ban unlicensed VoIP telephony service providers such as Skype, Yahoo!, MSN, Vonage, Net2Phone, Dialpad , Impetus, Novanet and Euros. This move comes mainly because these VoIP providers don’t pay 12 percent service tax and six percent of their revenue share. According to a report, the IB has asked the DoT to block the calls until a mechanism has been put into place to track these calls. Terrorists have continuously been making use of such internet telephony services as they are aware that India doesn’t possess any mechanism to track such calls.

“In the absence of Caller Line Identification (CLI) parameters of calls landing from abroad, it’s next to impossible to identify the country of location of the caller,” IB sources said.

The IB has asked the government to consider blocking Skype as well after the VoIP company refused to accept India’s request to share the encryption code making it difficult for the IB to decipher conversations of suspected terrorists.

This simply insane, a country like India which is seeing itself of the road towards development shouldn’t bother much things like these. If this rule comes in place, BPO and IT companies might consider migrating elsewhere and that would bring greater revenue loss.

Sources :

Rocking Team » India To Block Skype

Intelligence Bureau asks Indian Govt to block Skype, VoIP services