Use VOIP and go to Jail in Costa Rica?In his article, Neville points out:"On Saturday, an article in La Nación (in Spanish, and registration required), the leading and most influential Costa Rican daily newspaper, reports on some pretty radical measures that Costa Rica's state-owned telephone company is planning to get pushed through the Costa Rican legislature to prevent usage of internet phone services by making use of them illegal. " "According to La Nación, the Instituto Costarricense de Electricidad (ICE), the phone company, is deliberating two things - either, to consider internet telephony as a fraudulent activity and to make it a criminal offence for anyone to use VoIP services; or, treat it as an added-value service and regulate it. " His misses a couple of important points about VOIP and Costa Rica: 1) With the internet, data is data. Can we micro regulate what data is what? Is VOIP different from a .JPG image or a Real Audio clip? We see the data differently, but to the net they are just TCP/IP packets. 2) Calling the United States from Costa Rica costs around US $.50 per minute and the quality can be quite variable. If Costa Rica wants to emerge from its status as a third world country technologically, they need to realize that communication is important. I seem to recall an uproar not long ago when Panama announced that ISPs had to block VOIP ports. There was a tremendous uproar (especially by those it would have no direct impact on -- but data is data). Why has there been no similiar uproar in Costa Rica. I believe that some VOIP services are blocked. Maybe with only one (two) State Run ISP's they can get away with silently blocking the services and hope no one will notice. What other "data" may also be blocked or outlawed? | 
