The growth of internet telephony or Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) services has led to questions by policymakers and legislators over the regulation of VoIP. In this article, the authors consider the extent to which VoIP services are protected from an EU/US perspective and the concerns arising from the current legislative framework, mainly from privacy perspective. The second part considers VoIP services in general. The third part examines the European framework and in particular, the current categorisation of VoIP services, before considering the privacy perspective, taking into account the Directive on Privacy and Electronic Communications 2002/58 and the general Data Protection Directive 95/46. The fourth part will consider the US framework in protecting the privacy of communications, asserting that the federal courts and legislatures should act to explicitly protect VoIP oral internet communications. The final part will conclude by discussing the principal areas that still need to be addressed.

In its broadest definition, VoIP can be described as the ‘‘conveyance of voice, fax and unrelated services publicly or wholly over packet switched IP-based networks including peer-to-peer VoIP and VoIP services connected to PSTN’’. This section presents a broad overview of the technology involved in both internet voice and data transactions. It discusses, in a non-technical manner, how VoIP transmits voice communications over the internet. VoIP is a technology by which oral communications can be transferred from circuit-switched networks to or over Internet Protocol networks, and vice versa. VoIP transforms standard oral telephone signals into compressed data packets that are sent over the Internet Protocol. The audio signal at this point is captured either by way of a microphone or received from line input. This analogue representation is then converted to a digital representation at the audio input device. The resulting digital samples are copied into a memory buffer in blocks of frame length. Here, a silence detector decides whether the block is silence or a portion of speech. Prior to transmission over the internet, the block itself is written to a socket. Once this is completed, the communication is transmitted to another VoIP terminal. This terminal parses the header information and the block of audio is decoded applying the same codec and the samples written into a buffer. Once this step is complete, the block of samples is copied from the buffer to the audio output device. The audio output device makes the digital to analogue conversion and outputs the signal. VoIP can be used with either a telephone or a PC as the user terminal. This gives different modes of operation: PC to PC, PC to telephone, telephone to PC and telephone to telephone (via the internet), all VoIP protocols are application layer protocols.

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