Federal Communications Act of 1996

The Federal Communications Act of 1996 amended the Communications Act of 1934 and established a new set of regulations that would come to have an impact on the field of VoIP. The most important, and most highly debated, aspect of the act lies in its definitions of "telecommunications service" and "information service." These terms were defined in the act and are codified in 47 U.S.C. § 153 as follows:

"(20) INFORMATION SERVICE.--The term ''information service'' means the offering of a capability for generating, acquiring, storing, transforming, processing, retrieving, utilizing, or making available information via telecommunications, and includes electronic publishing, but does not include any use of any such capability for the management, control, or operation of a telecommunications system or the management of a telecommunications service."

"(46) TELECOMMUNICATIONS SERVICE.--The term ''telecommunications service'' means the offering of telecommunications for a fee directly to the public, or to such classes of users as to be effectively available directly to the public, regardless of the facilities used."

Every service must be classified as one of these two types of services. The reason this classification is so important is that the act is much stricter in regulating telecommunications services than information services. Thus the struggle with VoIP is determining when and if any type of service should be classified as a telecommunications service and be subject to the harsher restrictions of this act. These determinations can be seen in various decisions by both the FCC and the courts in the legal section of this website.

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