Abstract
The debate on the regulatory issues in the telecom industry has long been centered on economic regulations rather than social regulations due to its massive impact on related interested parties. However, in the ongoing trends of deregulation and regulatory reform, social regulation, characterized by its trans-sectoral and prevalent nature, has gained stronger legitimacy and significance than economic regulation. Also, the two different categories of regulation are sometimes mutually supportive, but in some cases, they might collide with each other. Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is a burgeoning service in the era of digital convergence. In the realm of social regulation, VoIP service providers, mostly comprised of competitive small and medium enterprises, are often plagued by the compliance costs demanded by authorities for fulfilling the goal of social regulation, which exacerbates the collision between social and economic regulation. The main concern of this paper falls on the social regulation of VoIP service providers, and the author decides to choose communications protection and surveillance issue as example due to its controversies in two aspects:the clash between different social goals (the maintenance of communicational privacy, national security, and social order at the same time) and between social and economic goals (the balance of goals presented in the Communications Protection and Surveillance Act, the developments of VoIP industry, and the rights of VoIP service providers). After analyzing the very differences between traditional telecom and VoIP service providers and reviewing the status of privacy protection and implications of telecom provider’s duty of surveillance assistance provision in Taiwan, this paper indicates that the crucial problem concerning the social regulation field, “technical feasibility" and "possible negative effects on VoIP service developments" should be considered, and it is imperative to figure out the possible solutions and to try to strike a balance between different contracdictory goals.