A carrier dispute redolent of net neutrality threatens trouble for the many small nonprofits who routinely rely on FreeConference for free telephone conference calls. This month, some telco tentacles and wireless carriers began blocking calls to the service, which is widely used by small nonprofits and activist groups. Why the blocking? FreeConference blames underhanded competition on behalf of the telcos' own conferencing services, but TechDirt explains what's likely the real issue:

[T]he [freeconference.com] business model was the same as those services that offered free international calls: arbitrage over termination fees. Since regulators put in place ridiculously high termination fees (the fees other telcos pay local telcos for connecting a call to that telco's end user) there was an arbitrage opportunity. These services could set up deals with the local telcos, drive many more calls to those local exchanges. The local telcos then get a ton of cash from the termination fees, and gives some of it back to the service that drove all that traffic.

So, it's consumer hostage-taking (with a whiff of prudery -- can terrorism be far behind?) versus a backwards regulatory structure. AT&T, Qwest, Sprint and Cingular are all apparently blocking at least some of these calls. Whatever the demerits of freeconference's business model and the points of dissimilarity with the Internet net neutrality dispute, peremptorily obstructing phone calls to particular numbers is the sort of low trick that rears new audiences skeptical of telcos. More immediately important for nonprofits -- freeconference is for the time being not a viable alternative for a conference call involving any sizable number of people, some of whom are sure to use one of these carriers. This is bad news for activists, for whom the "free" service, often accessed by people using cell phones or fixed-rate calling plans that incur no marginal charge for phone minutes, is a godsend vis-a-vis pricey professional conferencing services. Plenty of other free services are available to a simple Google search, though it's anyone's guess whether any with a similar business model have been or are about to be similarly targeted. (Anyone who's been using a different service want to comment?) DemocracyInction has used FreeConference for our webinars, and we ran into this for the first time on our training last week, when a couple of participants were mysteriously unable to dial in.