Time for truth.

No matter how, or why, you propose to regulate Voice Over IP services, you're regulating the Internet. (Image from Lawguru.com.)

And, as we've seen in previous attempts to do this, you are bound to have only limited success.

Consider the record. Porn, gambling, piracy, spam, hacking -- have any of them been stopped? No, they have grown as authorities worldwide have tried to "crack down" on these activities.

There has been an important exception, of course.

The exception is child porn.

Not that it's gone. So long as images of adults can be morphed, or images created from whole cloth in Adobe, the disgusting concept will not die.

But authorities have succeeded in rounding up, and imprisoning, many pedophiles thanks to the Internet. Despite the carping of critics, the Internet has been a positive boon for child porn enforcement, since it has delivered audit trails, and made cases possible against suspects who previously could hide their collections in basements, out of sight, then prey on children at night.

Hundreds, if not thousands, of pedophiles have been discovered, arrested, and jailed around the world, because cops have cooperated, and because they have funded investigations, using the Internet.

But the cost has been high. Nothing has been a slam dunk. Just as nothing is a slam dunk in our technical war against terrorism, where we need the active cooperation of many agencies who, while they fight child porn as hard as we do, have suspicions on this other front.

And that's the lesson. In order to succeed in regulating any Internet activity you need absolute unity in global law enforcement, you need ample funding, and you need to make sure the number of potential opponents is as limited as possible.

We don't have that in gambling, or in images of adults having sex, or in spam, or in piracy, or in hacking. We're making progress in some areas, but we'll never have the relative success we're having with child porn so long as we have legitimate motives for resistance. (Image of consensus from this great lesson on the scientific method, courtesy honors.org.)

• There is no worldwide consensus that images of adults having sex are evil.
• There is no worldwide consensus that gambling, in and of itself, is evil.
• There is no worldwide consensus on defining "online piracy," one that users agree with.
• There is no worldwide definition of spam.
• There is no worldwide consensus that there is no good excuse for hacking.

Without consensus all you have, potentially, is a tax regime, a tax "criminals" will pay and collect from the market, a tax that will only go toward criminal cartels.

So tread very carefully.