Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) will transform many aspects oftraditional telephony service including technology, the business modelsand the regulatory constructs that govern such service. Thistransformation is generating a host of technical, business, social andpolicy problems. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) couldattempt to mandate obligations or specific solutions to the policyissues around VoIP, but is instead looking first to industry initiativesfocused on key functionality that users have come to expect oftelecommunications services. High among these desired functionalities isaccess to emergency services that allow a user to summon fire, medicalor law enforcement agencies. Such services were traditionally required(and subsequently implemented) through state and federal regulations.Reproducing emergency services in the VoIP space has proven to be aconsiderable task, if for no other reason then the wide and diversevariety of VoIP implementations and implementers. Regardless of thisdifficulty, emergency service capability is a critical social concern,making it is particularly important for the industry to propose viablesolutions for promoting VoIP emergency services before regulators arecompelled to mandate a solution, an outcome that often sufferscompromises both through demands on expertise that may be betterrepresented in industry and through the mechanisms of politicalinfluence and regulatory capture. While technical and businesscommunities have, in fact, made considerable progress in this area,significant uncertainty and deployment problems still exist. Thequestion we ask is: can an industry based certification and labelingprocess credibly address social and policy expectations regardingemergency services and VoIP, thus avoiding the need for governmentregulation at this critical time?1 We hypothesize that it can. Toestablish this, we developed just such a model for VoIP emergencyservice compliance through industry certification and device labeling.The intent of this model is to support a wide range of emergency serviceimplementations while providing the user some validation that theservice will operate as anticipated. To do this we first examinepossible technical implementations for emergency services for VoIP.Next, we summarize the theory of certification as self-regulation andexamine several relevant examples. Finally, we synthesize a specificmodel for certification of VoIP emergency services. We believe that themodel we describe provides both short term and long-term opportunities.In the short term, an industry driven effort to solve the importantcurrent problem of emergency services in VoIP, if properly structuredand overseen as we suggest, should be both effective and efficient. Inthe long term, such a process can serve as a model for the applicationof self-regulation to social policy goals in telecommunications, anattractive tool to have as telecommunications becomes increasinglydiverse and heterogeneous.
