Microsoft Faces New Weighty Responsibilities as VOIP Phone Carrier

Now that Microsoft is buying Skype, new complications have cropped up that its management may never have thought of when it inked the deal a couple of months ago. During Microsoft clearly knew that it was buying a phone company, did the company's lawyers warn it that this would mean working with a whole new set of government agencies from a whole new direction?

For example, phone companies have a legal obligation to provide law enforcement with the ability to tap into conversations. During there's supposed to be a court order to do this, the phone company all in all has to comply. This is true around the world, which is why India was about to ban BlackBerry devices last year. It's as well true in the United States, where the Department of Homeland Security and related agencies use wiretaps on a regular basis to keep tabs on suspected criminals and terrorists.

The ability to tap phones has been around for a long time. Nevertheless the ability to tap into digital communications has been a tougher nut to crack. First, it was digital cell phone calls, and now the problems center around VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol). It's hard, yet not impossible, to tap a VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) call, nevertheless it helps a lot if you have access to the same switch where the VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) call originates or terminates.

As eWEEK's Fahmida Rashid explains, Microsoft filed a patent in 2009 for innovation that would greatly simplify the process of monitoring a VOIP conversation. At that time it was filed, this patent got little attention. Taking everything into account, during Microsoft had telephony products then, it wasn't a carrier. So if Microsoft had a need-or a warrant-that required listening in to a conversation over VOIP spontaneously phone system, it wouldn't have been that hard to arrange.

But that was at that time, and this is now. Microsoft, which is in the final stages of buying Skype, is effectively becoming a phone company. During VOIP carriers just as Skype haven't been wiretapped in the past, it was because of the technical difficulty. Once the voice information leaves the first Ethernet switch, it may be broken up into different packets being sent over different routes. Out on the open Internet, tapping such a phone conversation would have been impossible. With Microsoft's patent, to all appearances this is no longer the case.

While it's interesting that Microsoft came up with a way to monitor VOIP after a fashion that's a lot easier than trying to capture packets in midflight, one has to wonder if the Redmond Giant was planning to become a phone company all along.