France goes after Skype

French telecomm regulators are repeating their demand that Skype register as a "communications operator" under French law.  Registration would impose a range of legal obligations on the network, including developing mechanisms to allow "emergency calls" from non-subscribers, and to provide means of intercepting and recording calls "when legally required." 

   Skype, now owned by Microsoft, has continually responded that its services do not constitute "electronic communications services" as defined under French law, and thus it is not required to register as a provider of such services.  The French regulator, ARCEP, seems to be arguing that providing voice services "implies" it is a public telephone service, and thus it must register and comply with French law.  Including, according to an ARCEP spokesman, compelling it to declare its revenues to local and national tax authorities, and subjecting Skype to paying local taxes.

French telecom and mobile operators have raised concerns that they are losing revenues as consumers switch to various VoIP services (including Skype, Viber, and What's App).  Part of their complaint is that they must bear regulatory burdens and costs (particularly taxes) that other operators have not had to face.  France was also one of the countries pushing for new international Internet governance agreements in last years ITU meetings, as a means of allowing nations a legal foundation for regulating and taxing major global internet firms.  France also recently challenged Google, claiming Google News was anti-competitive by not paying for linking to content from French news sites.  Google allegedly offered to block all French news sites before the issue was quietly resolved.

Source -  French authorities launch Skype probe,  Computer Business Review
France Wants Skype To Pay Tax: Microsoft Says "Screw You,"  Silicon Angle

edit - fixed what had been a run on sentence about France & Google.

Skype starts billing other carriers

Remember when Skype was free?  While it's still free for computer-to-computer calls, Skype started instituting fees in 2010 for calls to wired and wireless telephones, group video calling, and other advanced services.  Now a part of Microsoft, Skype is introducing direct operator billing (DOB) as a mechanism for collecting those fees from its users.  Direct Operating Billing refers to systems that simplify the purchase and billing process (charges are billed directly to a user's existing online credit account, rather than requiring the collection of credit card or other payment information for each individual charge).  Microsoft feels that making the billing process easier to navigate will lead to greater use of fee-based services -

“We expect ease of payment to attract new users, while existing users will become more profitable customers as they increase their spend with us,” indicated Neil Ward, GM for business operations in Microsoft’s Skype division.

  I'm not so sure - people chose Skype because of its free services, and the advanced services that Skype charges for are mostly small niche services.  In addition, looking at it from an economic perspective, moving to DOB simplifies billing and somewhat reduces the ancillary cost of using a particular service, suggesting a shift in perceived cost and movement along the existing basic demand curve.  Reducing perceived costs, particularly fairly small indirect costs, may well result in some increase in use - but the overall impact is likely to be minimal. Simplified billing, however, is unlikely to significantly affect the underlying inherent demand for Skype's advanced options (i.e., shifting the whole demand curve). As such, the impact on overall use is likely to be small.

Source  -  Skype intros carrier billing,  telecoms.com

Skype to add social messaging

Skype, the leading Internet telephony service provider, is in the final stages of acquiring GroupMe, a group messaging service.  GroupMe applications enables text messaging and conference calls among designated circles of friends or colleagues across a range of operating systems (including smartphone apps for Apple, Android, BlackBerry and Windows operating systems.  This marks Skype's second major move into social messaging - the first, Qik, gave Skype access to video capture and sharing applications.
The acquisition helps Skype to expand it's offerings from traditional point-to-point audio and video communication in real time, to the potential of adding text and messaging, facilitating group and social media distributions, and adding archiving and asynchronous sharing features.  This helps Skype, and Microsoft (which has agreed to by Skype), better match up with announced real-time and social messaging initiatives from Apple, Google, and Facebook.

The move to shift to social media for messaging has some interesting implications, bringing to fruition the long-identified potential for digital and IP networks to develop new patterns of communication (beyond one-to-one and mass models).  It could foreshadow a major shift in how people communicate.

Source -  Skype pushes into social messaging with GroupMe acquisition  FierceMobileContent

Adding value through integration: Skype from Facebook

One of the general themes of this blog and course is that in a hyper-competitive market, one path to success is to find ways to add value to your product or service.  Facebook's been fairly good at that - first enabling its use as an alternative to email, then as a platform for sharing and streaming video (see earlier post).  Their latest added-value service is to allow users use Skype for video chats with their Facebook friends directly from Facebook, without having to have the regular Skype software.  This is an extension of recent Facebook - Skype collaborations (Skype users have been able to message Facebook friends directly from the Skype software platform).
The integration of these related services adds value for Facebook and its users, by integrating video or audio chat functionality, and benefits Skype and its users by tapping the more than 750 million active Facebook users (being able to access more people more easily).  The move can also be seen as a competitive response to Google's newly launched social network service, Google+, which includes a video calling component.

Source: "Facebook and Skype announce video sharing partnership" Telecoms.com