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Democracy & Technology Blog GoogleTalk About Game Over

Bret Swanson
August 24, 2005
Internet

So now that Google has entered the instant message and voice-over-IP games, adding to the existing 76 million U.S. users of AIM, Yahoo, and MSN Messenger, not to mention Skype‘s 47 million VoIP users and a few million Vonage customers, with robust broadband video conferencing from these web-based applications providers on the way, can we finally agree that the rigid price ceilings and floors and geographic pricing layers and cross-subsidies for traditional voice telephony administered by the 51 state utility commissions are no longer operative?

-Bret Swanson

Bret Swanson

Bret Swanson is a Senior Fellow at Seattle's Discovery Institute, where he researches technology and economics and contributes to the Disco-Tech blog. He is currently writing a book on the abundance of the world economy, focusing on the Chinese boom and developing a new concept linking economics and information theory. Swanson writes frequently for the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal on topics ranging from broadband communications to monetary policy.