Google VoIPing for White Spaces

Google has tapped into the power of Cause Caller and its underlying Asterisk technology to lobby Congress.

Cause Caller is one of a couple of services floating around mixing IP telephony with political activism. For Google's campaign, Cause Caller allows a user to enter a phone number and then uses the information to setup a VoIP call to a randomized list of Congressional representatives focusing on telecom issues. GigaOm says as of Friday afternoon, a whole 11 calls had been made on behalf of Google's White Spaces lobbying push.

Cost per call is "less than 3 cents per minute" and the infrastructure is a combination of Amazon's EC2 server service and Asterisk handling the PBX functionality.  

While Cause Caller is a "hobby" for the operator, there are other folks out there combining Asterisk and politics for profit.  Popvox [1], run by David Troy, has been working with various Democratic political causes since 2005. During the 2006 election cycle, Popvox logged over a million voter-to-voter phone calls for 25 Democratic campaigns. Volunteers would use a website to make calls to potential voters, preserving privacy by not displaying a volunteer's phone number, while at the same time providing call monitoring information to the campaign.

For more:
- GigaOm reports on Google's use of VoIP service Cause Caller [2]. Article

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