Ben Charny had a great post on the backlash of VoIP in Germany. Vodafone Germany made it known to German telecom regulators (during a tariff filing) that it plans to disable calls from Skype and other Internet-based VoIP operators.  Obviously, wireless operators are feeling threatened by VoIP - that is pretty much a similar reaction to their wireline counterparts.  However, with the advent of seamless roaming ,VoIP running on a flat-fee based WLAN model and a pretty decent QoS (using CODECs such as GIPS) can certainly be a big problem to wireless operators.  While the article does state that "Vodafone's other 15 divisions serving nations in Europe and Asia have not enacted such a policy", French operator SFR made a similar announcement back in March (i.e. that it will block VoIP and peer-to-peer streaming traffic).

I wonder what legal recourse Skype would have against this, but these are yet another couple of examples representing proofpoints that whoever owns the last mile typically has a huge turf advantage.  And even companies such as Vonage can be quite vulnerable.  OK, so Madison River Communications was caught in the act of port blocking and got slapped on the wrist by the FCC.  But that was sloppy on Madison River's part.  What if instead of port blocking, it would have just put on additional traffic, or added some randomly generated noise / delays / jitter / etc.?  Such an action would be much harder for Vonage or any other VoIP SP to prove, and hence would create a big barrier for a wider adoption of VoIP.