Why you can't block Skype

Who can forget these clever Chinese men who ran up US$1.25 million worth of calls in the UAE before being apprehended? They're an extreme example, but the reality is that in a heavily restricted, very expensive market, people will be attracted to piracy. Just look at P2P software, music and film piracy.

But when products start becoming affordable and accessible, such as with iTunes' music store, pirates evolve into paid customers. Skype itself isn't free if you want to call international landlines, but it's cheap and convenient enough that people are happy to pay those charges.

A failed ban

By trying to ban VoIP, Middle East telcos such as the UAE's Etisalat have effectively cut themselves out of the game. There are already tens of thousands of people using Skype and similar applications in the UAE alone. Skype.com is blocked, but people download the installer in the freezones. They get it from general software download sites. They get it via P2P. They get friends and family to email it to them. They get it on their laptop while overseas.

Despite the ban, the application works, because once installed, Skype is almost impossible to block. It uses encrypted tunnels, file transfers and instant messaging sessions, all of which are undetectable without filtering. AP Connections CTO Art Reisman set up a computer lab experiment to try and detect Skype traffic whizzing between two PCs. His analysis, according to an interview with Zdnet: "When examining the stream I failed to see any human discernible call set up, so without prior knowledge of a call being made I could never be certain if what I was seeing was a Skype call."

Despite promising to make VoIP legal since 2004, there's no real sign of voice telephony on the UAE horizon. Some predict a "ruling is expected" Q1 2007, but who really knows?

A futile block

The UAE has been so determined to protect the vast amounts of money that it earns from its overpriced telephony system that it doesn't just block Skype, it has removed the address from its DNS servers. People trying to access the page don't even get the regular: "This site has been blocked..."; instead a Network Error message appears. Google Skype blocked and the very first links refer to the block in the UAE.

Efonica, a VoIP company actually based in the UAE, is also blocked. So is the 100 million subscriber Vonage, as well as Net2phone, Webphone, DialPad, Babble, Go2Call, GizmoProject, IConnectHere, Lingo, MutualPhone, Netzero, Nikotel, Packet8, QuantumVoice, SipPhone, SunRocket, TeleSip, TerraCall, VoicePulse, and doubtless myriad others.

But plenty remain unblocked. MindSpring isn't yet blocked, nor is Jajah, VoipCheap, Wengo, BestNetCall, Glophone, StanaPhone, GnomeMeeting/Ekiga, Linphone, NetTelephone, STASoft, Adwell, Ageet or Yate (at least as of Monday 14th August 2006, when this article was published). Downloads.com lists 126 entries under "Web Phones". Google lists millions of pages for "net to phone calls", all of which have dozens of different ads for providers down the side.

Driving businesses away

Quite apart from being impossible to fully block, the ban on VoIP is foolish on so many levels. As well as losing Etisalat a share of the internet telephony pie, it's actively driving businesses away. Telco execs, such as British Telecom's Olivier Campenon, openly admit that there are international companies deciding not to set up in the UAE because of sky-high expensive and restricted communications costs.

It is difficult in cultures that are used to restrictiveness and social oppression to come to terms with an open, uncontrollable phenomenon like the internet. But there is no going back. The internet - and its users - will win every battle, circumvent every block, break every wall that governments, telcos and ISPs put up. The only answer is to embrace the net, and take advantage of the money that people are prepared to pay. And they are prepared to pay for VoIP, so trying to block it is just driving customers into the arms of other providers.