With the Federal Communications Commission's (FCC) last week move of seeking details from Google about its Voice feature, for reasons laid out by AT&T, Google is apparently vexed with the telco for having raised an uproar about call restrictions of the voicemail application.

AT&T had earlier drawn the attention of the FCC towards the press reports that clearly suggested Google's policy of systematically blocking telephone calls from Google Voice customers to certain rural-area telephone numbers.

The issue of contention between AT&T and Google, pertaining to the Voice service, is that while the former wants that Google should pay the same charges that other carriers pay for calls; the latter states that Voice is a free service which can circumvent the rural numbers for which call rates are high.

Directing Google's displeasure against AT&T, Google attorney Richard Whitt wrote on his policy blog: "AT&T apparently now wants web applications - from Skype to Google Voice - to be treated the same way as traditional phone services. Their approach is what a former FCC chairman has called 'regulatory capitalism,' the practice of using regulation to block or slow down innovation."

With both AT&T and Google having legitimate gripes, chances are that their ongoing brawl may actually help work out a way in solving the underlying problem - that of the explicit inequity of high cost of termination charges levied by rural operators!