When State-Owned Telco Is Losing Money, Play The National Security Card

from the so-that's-how-it-works dept

Tue, Nov 28th 2006 11:12am — Mike Masnick

We've seen plenty of stories over the years where governments who have state-owned telcos put in place various policies to protect the revenue from those sources at the expense of their citizens. Lately that's taken the form of blocking VoIP offerings. In Zimbabwe, the government has allowed competition in the mobile phone market, while still owning a mobile carrier itself -- but it required all mobile operators to make use of the state-owned international gateway. A Zimbabwe court struck down that rule, allowing the mobile operators to use independent gateways. Of course, rather than complaining about how this will cause more problems for the state-owned (and, of course, money-losing) operator, Zimbabwe is now claiming that using independent gateways is a threat to national security. This fits with a recently proposed law that would allow the government to listen in on calls. Combine all of this and it sounds a lot less like a national security issue, and one where the government wants to be able to spy on its people and protect the monopoly of the state-owned operator who apparently can't compete with the privately owned competitors.

Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.

Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.

While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.

–The Techdirt Team

6 Comments

If you liked this post, you may also be interested in...

Reader Comments

Subscribe: RSS

View by: Time | Thread

Stu, 28 Nov 2006 @ 11:21am

Hey, it's Zimbabwe - what do you expect?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Sanguine Dream, 28 Nov 2006 @ 11:22am

You really shouldn't have
posted this in place that American politians may read it. I can see someone pushing for this in 2008 presidential race because, "Someone has to think of the children." And if people start to oppose it then they will play the, "If you don't support this then you support terrorism" card.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Kev, 28 Nov 2006 @ 11:56am

I'm glad we would never allow spying on our phones here in America.... wait...
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Paul, 28 Nov 2006 @ 12:20pm

I declare
That anyone who hates the Coreys also hates America!
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
ScaredOfTheMan, 28 Nov 2006 @ 1:11pm

National Secutiry is a BS argument in this case
If the government (Zimbawa or other) wants to listen and record your phone calls it can easily do it right before each operators international gateways.

This is a money grab pure and simple. I bet the government owned gateway's rates are 3 X that of the carriers.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
|333173|3|_||3, 28 Nov 2006 @ 7:00pm

That is the case in Aus with regard to DSLAM access, the better ISPs have beeen building thier own ADSL2+ DSLAMS for years, Telstra have only just begun, and only in exchanges where competitors have ADSL2+. Everywhere els is stuck on 1.5 Mbps TElstra connectuions, or Cable Whirlpool has more detail about his.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]