Page 52 - Payout Magazine Online Vol. 10.03 - XBiz LA Photos! Bruce Friedman Innerview! Articles & More!

n the months since large portions of the country
Iand the world began practicing social distancing
in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the rise of
Zoom as a videoconferencing solution has been
swift and broad.

Across the educational, private and corporate
sectors, including among many adult companies,
Zoom use and traffic have soared (along with
those of Cisco’s WebEx, which has received less
attention than Zoom, possibly because its brand
name isn’t quite as catchy). For Zoom, the surge
in use has been accompanied by certain benefits
ñ as well as increasing scrutiny.

On the plus side, from Zoom’s perspective,
was an announcement issued by the Federal
Communications Commission last Friday, in which
the FCC announced it has issued a “temporary
waiver of its access arbitrage rules” to Inteliquent,
a telecommunications company that carries
traffic for both Zoom and WebEx.

In the announcement, the FCC said that
without the waiver, “the massive increase in
conference calls made by American consumers
using Zoom and WebEx to work and attend
classes from home during the COVID-19
pandemic would likely result in Inteliquent being
deemed an ‘access-stimulating’ carrier” under
the FCC’s rules. That designation would “trigger
financial responsibilities ó namely significant cost
increases ó for Inteliquent that would impede
its ability to serve these conference calling
companies.”

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said that the FCC’s
access-stimulating carrier rules were designed to
target “companies that have been exploiting our
intercarrier compensation system by generating
inflated call volumes to pad their bottom lines”
and “weren’t intended to ensnare companies that,
during a national emergency, are experiencing
unprecedented call volumes that would push
them out of compliance without a waiver.”

Since Inteliquent doubtlessly would have
passed those cost increases along to the two
customers primarily responsible for its increased
usage, the FCC’s waiver was a welcome
development for Zoom and Cisco, as well.

On the increased scrutiny side of the ledger,
Zoom has quickly found itself under fire from
privacy advocates, who are taking the company
to task over allegedly falsely claiming their
video calls offer “end to end” encryption. Other

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