The Ethiopian government, Al Jazeera reports, has criminalized the use of Skype and other VoIP services like Google Talk. Using VoIP services is now punishable by up to 15 years in prison. This law actually passed last month, but mostly went unnoticed outside of the country. Ethiopian authorities argue that they imposed these bans because of ânational security concernsâ and to protect the stateâs telecommunications monopoly. The country only has one ISP, the state-owned Ethio Telecom, and has been filtering its citizenâs Internet access for quite some time now to suppress opposition blogs and other news outlets.
