Regulations in Sweden

Magnus Sjöstedt and Oskar Bergquist, VoIP regulatory issues, M.Sc. Thesis, June 2003

For current regulations see Swedish Post and Telecom Authority (PTS)

PTS has quite a number of reports available (in Swedish). Such as [Cave 2008]

Slide Notes

[Sjöstedt 2003] Magnus Sjöstedt and Oskar Bergquist, ‘IP Telephony : A Swedish Perspective’, Master’s thesis, KTH, Microelectronics and Information Technology, IMIT, Stockholm, Sweden, 2003 [Online]. Available: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:kth:diva-93111 Links to an external site.

[Cave 2008] Martin Cave, ‘A Note on Possible Regulatory Strategies in Sweden to 2015 - Martin-Cave-Regl-Strategies-in-Sweden-to-2015.pdf.’ Warwick Business School, UK, Nov-2008 [Online]. Available: http://www.pts.se/upload/Ovrigt/Tele/Bransch/Langsiktig%20analys/Martin-Cave-Regl-Strategies-in-Sweden-to-2015.pdf Links to an external site.. [Accessed: 05-Aug-2015]

Carl Johan af Petersens, Telecommunications Regulation SWEDEN, Vinge KB, Advokatfirman, http://lexmundi.com/Document.asp?DocID=1883

Transcript

[slide65] Now, in Sweden, Magnus Sjöstedt and Oskar Bergquist already wrote a Master's thesis in June of 2003 regarding voice over IP regulations. And the Swedish PTS, the Swedish Post and Telecom Authority, has a series of reports – unfortunately, they're only available in Swedish – about the regulations for voice over IP. And in Sweden, there was a very important change that occurred, and that was when the law changed for public telephoning, there used to be a word in Swedish called "teleoperator". And if you were a licensed teleoperator, you had a certain set of requirements spelled out in the law, and one of those was you had to provide service to any customer in the area where you were an operator. And you had to do it on an equal basis for the customers. The only thing you could discriminate on was the size of the volume of their business. But any customer who wanted, you had to provide them service. After the change in telecom regulations, that went away. We no longer have a legal concept of a teleoperator. But a side effect of being a teleoperator at the time was you had no liability for the contents of anything carried on your network. So does anyone know what the Swedish regulations are if you have a newspaper? Who's responsible for the content printed in the newspaper? [student answers: The publisher.] And there's a named person at the publisher who is personally responsible for what's published in the paper. Contrast that to the situation for the former teleoperator, which is you had no responsibility for the content of what you carried. Right? Because your service was just to connect people to each other. So we're in this situation today where it's not clear what the responsibilities are if you're carrying voice over IP traffic. Are you responsible for the content or not? Now, in some countries, there's been very strong push to say, why yes, if it's hateful speech or if it's against minorities or various other sorts of things, then the government can come after you because of this content that you're carrying. And that is if you're an added value information provider, you're not covered under the common carrier teleoperator-like laws. So this becomes a very, very complex environment when you start producing services. Who has the liability? So think about it as you do your services.