WASHINGTON - Providers of VOIP (voice over Internet Protocol) telephone services need the "regulatory certainty" that would be created with a national U.S. government policy, a report released Tuesday suggested.

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Authors of the report, entitled "The Future of Internet Phone Call Technology: Regulatory Imperatives to Protect the Promise of VOIP for Industry and Consumers," advocated a national policy on VOIP that would be relatively free of regulation but would protect the growing VOIP industry from dozens of state telecommunications regulations.

Authors of the report, sponsored by the New Millennium Research Council (NMRC), suggest that VOIP could transform the telecommunications industry in next five to 10 years. But the U.S. telecom regulatory policy, which currently imposes fairly heavy regulations on traditional telephone service and few regulations on Internet-related services, needs to change as VOIP blurs the lines between the two communications media, the report's authors said.

The report calls VOIP a "middle ground" between traditional telecom services and data services. As such, VOIP should be subject to some federal regulations but should be spared from heavy regulation so that the technology is allowed to grow, the report's authors said. The report is available at http://www.newmillenniumresearch.org/news/voip_nmrc.pdf.

VOIP has the potential to cause a "major paradigm shift" in telecom and could have as big an economic impact as railroads or the printing press, said Dave McClure, president of the U.S. Internet Industry Association. With telecom companies moving their telephone calls from circuit-switched telephone networks to packet-based data, the old regulations and pricing schemes based on circuits don't make sense, McClure said.

McClure called for a national VOIP policy. During a conference on VOIP at the U.S. Federal Communications Commission on Dec. 1, FCC Chairman Michael Powell said he expected the commission to work on a VOIP policy in the next year.

However, treating telephone calls that move over circuits differently from telephone calls that move partly or fully over the Internet makes little sense, added McClure, one of the authors of the NMRC report. "We can no longer keep pretending that packets sent over one kind of network are different than (information) sent over another kind of network," McClure said at a press conference Tuesday.

Other authors of the study called for the FCC and Congress to ease regulations on traditional telecom instead of attempting to shoehorn telecom regulations into the VOIP industry. "To look at imposing on the new (VOIP) industry the old rules is really working on the wrong direction," said Lee McKnight, a report co-author and associate professor of information studies at Syracuse University.

McKnight called on Congress to change the rules on how telecom and information services are defined and regulated. The current rules are "arbitrary" and a "relic of the past," he said. With many telecom companies already moving parts of their voice traffic over the Internet, it is nearly impossible to separate a telecom service from an Internet service, he said.

"This VOIP is increasingly infecting the entire communications network," McKnight added.

Advocates of limited regulation at the Dec. 1 FCC hearing pushed for the FCC to require such services as enhanced 911, services for the disabled and funding for telecom services in rural or poor areas. But most attendees there asked the FCC to stay away from regulating prices for VOIP service, as it has with some telecom services. Competition between VOIP providers should negate the need for price-based regulation, said report co-author Martha Garcia-Murillo, assistant professor of information studies at Syracuse.

Congress and the FCC need to resist the temptation to impose regulations from the circuit-switched world on VOIP, because heavy-handed regulation could result in the whole industry moving out of the U.S., added Glenn Woroch, report co-author and executive director of the Center for Research on Telecommunication Policy.

Because of VOIP, the FCC has a better opportunity to deregulate traditional telecom services, Woroch added. VOIP, which makes up about 11 percent of telephone traffic outside the U.S., has shown the FCC why current regulations will no longer make sense, he said. "We really need to listen to new technologies like voice over IP because they expose the warts in the existing system," Woroch added.

But ending all telecom regulation makes little sense and is unlikely politically, said Brad Ramsey, general counsel of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners. Destroying the current FCC regulatory regime would cost "a ton of taxpayer money," he said, when asked to comment on the report.

telecom regulations give customers a place to complain if their service goes out, Ramsey said. Rolling back telecom regulations "is a politically naive place to come from," he said.

Ramsey also questioned why some of the report's authors would suggest state regulators be kept away from regulating VOIP. "The notion that state regulatory oversight is somehow going to cause a problem is baffling to me," Ramsey said. "I don't understand the argument that regulation is going to destroy the Internet. I'm looking for the empirical evidence."