Costa Rica's countrywide telephone monopoly is trying to make it a crime to make a Voice over IP telephone call. From the article:
"One Costa Rican official of an agency seeking to promote the Central American country's software industry said last week that ICE's proposal would be "disastrous" to the country's efforts to grow its software development and outsourcing businesses."
That's exactly right, and applies equally to any region of the U.S. trying to encourage the growth of Knowledge Economy businesses. The telecoms really need to face up to the fact that they are no longer in the telephony business--they are in the data transport business, and they need to start acting that way. If they accepted the notion that they are selling bandwidth, not dialtone (or TV programming, for that matter), and upgraded their systems to support the demand for bandwidth, they would find that they could make pretty good money doing that.
But pigs may fly first.