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It does seem pretty odd to consider software a telecommunication service, to me, absolutely. All the software is doing is wrapping up a message for someone else to send. It would sort of be like considering envelopes, paper and writing (when taken together) to be a mail service.

Taken another way, if we think of XMPP as a telecommunication service, and require providers to register, do we also consider HTTP to be a telecommunication service, and also require registration of every public access HTTP server? Both are protocols that, at their core, pass messages. Who's going to ratify all of those forms? This feels like it would be expensive to enforce, and if the law does not explicitly name XMPP (or explicitly define the difference between a telecommunication service that it covers and one that it does not in a way that excludes such widely used things as HTTP), it should not be selectively applied to XMPP. It should either be rewritten, or applied to technologies that existed or were expected when it was drafted.



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