Last week, Google filed its response to the FCC's letter of inquiry on Google Voice. You can find the actual (redacted) letter here. Leaving aside AT&T's effort to make political hay from this on the network neutrality side (which has included such colorful issues as whether GV blocks calls to Benedictine nuns), the letter presents Google's explanation of how GV works and whether the FCC should treat it as a Title I “Information Service” entitled to do whatever it wants or a Title II “Telecommunications Service” with a duty to complete any call.
My quick answer is: Google has some good arguments in light of recent precedent. There are some older cases that emphasize whether a transmission is really one “continuous transmission” even if broken into pieces, certain functions performed by Google Voice are pretty clearly Telecom service. However, because the Brand X decision makes status of the service turn on the nature of the “offer” to the subscriber, not on the nature of the service itself, Google is probably right that this is Title I. But there is enough precedent pointing the other way to make a finding of Title II telecom service plausible. So the FCC needs to make a decision — which nobody has asked them to do.
To which I will add: The FCC has really screwed this up over the years by being incredibly inconsistent. Damn Michael Powell and Ken Ferree for pushing the whole “information services” classification as the “get out of regulation free and forever card,” only to discover it was much messier in reality. Google Voice is exactly the sort of thing that Scalia in dissent warned about and Thomas in the majority poo-pooed as unlikely: something that looks and acts like Title II telecom defining itself as Title I information service.
I begin again by noting this doesn't have anything to do with network neutrality per se, although the FCC's recent NPRM asks whether to extend some sort of rules to applications. So we can still debate whether Google Voice should be required to complete