Yahoo

I just downloaded the beta of Yahoo’s new Instant Messenger with VOIP. This will change the world! Yahoo should find sufficient advertising --- company web sites may be willing to pay for a VOIP contact with the company’s home offices, resulting from search engine activity. Should be a breakthrough for small business including my own.

AOL, MSN and Google will soon introduce their own versions if in fact they are not already doing so. Their combined market power may be the only thing big enough to overcome the combined political-economic resistance from the cartel of old line phone companies.

As it is, we might expect the price for ISP connection to go up in order to counter the loss of telephone revenue from long-distance. It would be nice if we could find access to the Internet by some means other than the phone company, but that is another issue. In the meantime, one might expect to see an end to toll calls and time charges, at least a move in the right direction.

In Uruguay, the privatization of the water supply has lead to a situation wherein water is unaffordable for many. Information and communication like water are essential public utilitys where equal free access is the only fair policy and with both the overall economy benefits by its being so.