"It's too complicated and expensive for government to perform mass data collection & tracking if they have to deal with thousands of small mom-&-pop ISPs."

Yes, that's why the push for regulatory barriers happened in the first place. I'm not saying it *will* be undone, just that it *could* be.

Why is it not possible to break the monopolies? Just stop treating ISPs as utilities, lower the artificial barriers to entry, and we'll have an explosion of local ISPs just like we had back in the old days, before we erected a regulatory wall to stop mom-and-pop internet providers and force us into these monopolies.

This is a common misconception - frogs don't stay in boiling water, even if it's heated slowly. The only time that a frog will not jump out of even a slowly-heated pot is when the sides are too steep. I guess frogs are smarter than humans, in a lot of ways.

Depends on what the balloon is made out of, now doesn't it? Where is the video of you performing this experiment, btw? Pics or it didn't happen.

They will in vacuum. Helium is lighter than air. It is not an anti-gravity gas.

Yes, so they can put in 30 or 40 500k flash ads that change hourly so you can't cache them. Great idea! I have a better one: How about they provide the service that they're getting paid to provide? If they can't do it, maybe they should have thought about that before they went and offered it.

Yes. Yes it is.

I hate rhetorical questions.

I happily switched from a Verizon land line to Vonage back when it was first a feasible option.

I was so happy to ditch Verizon, a company that has, in its many forms, sapped extraordinary amounts of money from me for years in all forms of fees and extraordinary charges from charging me $49 to switch from messenger service to standard service to hundreds of dollars for a measly yellow pages ad, which they never cancelled even when I requested it.

Their FiOS could become the greatest thing since the wheel, their cellular phone coverage could blanket the globe; they've charged me outrageous prices for mediocre service for most of my adult life. They're not getting another penny from me. Ever.

I'm not the only one who feels this way and they know it. Vonage represents a nice alternative to their bloated service that thousands of people have flocked to. That's why they're trying to kill it.

Verizon can kill Vonage. I'll just go someplace else.

I'll go back to Verizon on the day Jessica Alba comes to my house with black silk teddy on bearing a fruit basket and massage oil.

Good point.