One of the speakers at today’s VoIP Developer Conference in San Jose so eloquently repeated the old adage that when you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail. At the conclusion of the event, I learned that the FCC voted for proposed rules that would require Internet telephony service providers, or ITSPs (news - alert) to make sure their equipment allows police wiretaps.

I read the story disbelief. Wiretaps? Today at the show, there were over 500 attendees learning how they can build the next generation of VoIP devices and guess what? Most of these solutions won’t have wires. Yes, WiFi (news - alert) telephony is the future of VoIP. (news - alert) Worse yet, there are sessions at the conference focusing on peer to peer products and these sessions attracted a healthy number of developers who are working on such applications. We all know Skype (news - alert) is a peer-to-peer VoIP software application that doesn’t requite a central service provider. The government keeps moving forward as they must but regulating VoIP is like pushing wind.

Yesterday’s keynote speaker, Michael Stanford, Intel’s (news - alert - quote) Technology Strategist mentioned that Skype has 18 million users, a tremendous number. We all know that there is no way to centrally monitor the VoIP calls between Skype users. It is that simple. So even though WiFi telephony calls may pass over the public Internet, you won’t have a central place where you can tap into them.

Soon, we will see widespread adoption of encrypted VoIP. Security is paramount in communications and legitimate users need this technology.  The government may not even be aware that a new class of product is about to surface that will natively support peer-to-peer VoIP calls. As this technology evolves, there will be no service providers to work with.

The solution of course is to capture all packets on the Internet, in the hope that you will ferret out the ones you need later with a court order. This obviously has the privacy advocates going crazy. Will this ever happen? I am not sure but I expect to see the feds at next year’s VoIP Developer Conference.