Skype and Google next against the wall in India

The government met with Indian mobile operators yesterday, resulting in an ultimatum being issued that lawful interception of BlackBerry communications must be made possible by the end of August. But the minutes of an earlier meeting, obtained by the Financial Times, show that RIM is not the only the company that the India intends to tackle.

That meeting, held on July 12, was with representatives of network operators and internet service providers, and listed Skype and Google as companies to be targeted over time:

It's unlikely that the Indian government is interested in Google's search business, but about 20 million Indians are active on Google's social networking service, Orkut, which encourages them to communicate with each other over Google Talk.

Arranging lawful interception of peer-to-peer services like Skype and Google Talk will be more difficult than for BlackBerry. The latter at least goes through a single server, while VoIP communications such as Skype are genuinely peer-to-peer in that once a call has been established the communication is entirely decentralised.