By doing so, the company has avoided incurring a €500k fine.
Background: For many years, regulators have struggled in categorising VoIP telephony services when deciding the rules to which they should be subject. Repeated attempts of regulators to get Skype (and similar services), to comply with the requirements typical of an electronic communications provider have therefore failed. In June 2019, the European Court of Justice finally ruled that services like SkypeOut (which allows users to call phone numbers), are in the scope of electronic communications services (ECS) and should be regulated as such.
The Dutch dispute is over: The ECJ decision was related to a case brought to it by a Belgian court, but it is having repercussions elsewhere too. On 21 August 2019, the Dutch regulator ACM announced that, following the ECJ ruling, Skype also registered its SkypeOut service as an ECS in the Netherlands. This puts to an end a dispute between the ACM and Skype, similar to the one that ran in Belgium between the company and the regulator BIPT. In 2017, the ACM demanded Skype to register its service as an ECS, and imposed a fine of €50k for each day of failure to comply, up to €500k. Today, the ACM declared the dispute over, with no need to pay the fine.
SkypeOut will be an ECS throughout the EU soon: While the disputes over the nature of the SkypeOut service have only occurred in a few countries, the new definition of ECS in the recently approved European Electronic Communications Code means that SkypeOut and similar services will soon be classified as ECSs anyway. These provisions will become valid in December 2020 across the EU.
