California gives up on trying to regulate and tax VoIP

In what we can only hope is the beginning of a larger trend, the California state Public Utilities Commission has decided to give up on trying to regulate Voice over IP and has ceded oversight to the FCC, with the commissioners voting 3-to-1 to end their appeal of an FCC ruling that designanted VoIP as an interstate service. Not that we necessarily love the FCC's track record when it comes to getting this stuff, but they've been surprisingly clueful about VoIP, and the less regulation and taxation VoIP has to deal with the better. E911 calling is definitely an issue,
but trying to regulate Voice over IP calling services as if they were traditional phone companies was only making it clear how much trouble regulatory frameworks created in the 20th century are having at keeping up with emerging technologies. The easy example: if I live in New York and sign up for Vonage and ask for a number in North Dakota,
which under which state's jurisdiction would I fall? Ultimately it makes more sense to have one national set of rules and regulations rather than force companies to navigate 50 separate sets of state rules and regulations, but we suspect that given enough time, VoIP is going to make a complete mess of national telecommunications regulations, too.