The voice era is dead

Ironically, the Telecommunications Act of 1996, the first major revision of U.S. telecommunications law since 1934, focused on enabling voice communications and ownership of voice switches. The emergence of the internet, and mobile substitution, seemingly had not occurred to lawmakers.

From IP Carrier: U.S. Telcos Have Lost 87% of Voice Accounts in 18 Years

  Also,

It is a truism that regulators never can keep up with technology, which is a reasonable argument for caution where it comes to regulating just about anything central to the internet, which keeps changing.

The logical implication might be that the historic light-touch treatment of anything related to computing likely should be the presumption, even if consumer protection or antitrust remedies might from time to time be deemed necessary.

The reason for such caution is that computing and the internet itself continue to change. And if there is anything history shows, it is that the leaders in any single era rarely--if ever--are the leaders in the succeeding era. So “punishing” a leader in one era, when an era is about to evolve, does not make too much long-term sense.

We might today believe it is nonsensical to consider the web browser a source of competitive advantage, as though the browser provides some sort of business moat. Nevertheless, not so long ago, the browser was considered a source of anti-competitive advantage.

IP Carrier: If the Internet is Changing, Backward-Looking Regulation Maybe Not So Smart