Google Voice, Phone Sex Lines, and the FCC

Google has responded to the Federal Communications Commission regarding an issue the FCC had with Google Voice blocking calls.

Google says it has blocked access to certain numbers because they noticed they were being used for phone sex lines and similar "party" lines.

The Google Blog post had this to say "we began restricting calls to certain telephone number prefixes. But over the past few weeks, we've been looking at ways to do this on a more granular level. We told the FCC today that Google Voice now restricts calls to fewer than 100 specific phone numbers, all of which we have good reason to believe are engaged in traffic pumping schemes."

Google's practice of blocking calls came to the FCC's attention after AT&T filed a complaint about Google Voice blocking calls.

Here is the official response from Google to the FCC

10-28-09 Google Voice Letter to FCC