VOIP

A lead column in IBD cries, cable TV and VOIP threaten the Bells. Hello! My rants for some three or four years now have proclaimed an Information Revolution that may be bloodier than the other war in terms of the economy. The old phone companies represent some 200 billion in revenue, almost as big as oil. They will not go quietly, but go they must.

In the early days, the Indians cut down telegraph lines. Information was a scarce resource! Anyone or anything that could deliver information or enable communication was golden. Newspapers, telephones, radio, movies and recordings exploited cheap commodities paper, the air actually and copper wire to sell information and enable communication. As long as there is an abundant cheap commodity that can be processed/exploited to meet a demand, there can be rapid economic growth. Just like a small business or the early American farmers exploiting abundant land to produce wheat to meet world demand.

The worm has turned! Information is no longer a scarce resource! Ah, but the telephone and media industry are still trying to treat it as such.
The opportunity to follow the worm, if I can run that one into the ground, is right at hand. Make all communication and access to information free! Sell the means to that end! The computer industry is already doing just that. It is a transition of course, but the computer industry, in the broad sense, is blocked by the sanctioned monopoly on information, the wires and the EM spectrum, still sold as property.

I am ready with my Ditch Witch to dig a fiber optic cable to two or three of my neighbors. If I were a Ham, the other sort, I would fiddle with the CDMA code over the entire radio frequency to communicate undetected within the so-called disregarded floor of thermal noise. Skip cutting down telephone poles as an act of civil disobedience.

Enough, already