This is already how H-1B visas work. They must be paid at or above the average wage for their job title and location.

The wages are listed here: http://www.flcdatacenter.com/

Resurrecting this long-dormant account to respond to this trolling:

Firstly, speaking as an H-1B holder, the law *requires* that H-1B workers are paid the average salary or better for their job title in their location -- e.g. an H-1B worker hired as a "junior software engineer" in San Francisco cannot be paid less than $90,000. It is therefore mathematically impossible for H-1B workers to lower the average wage paid to tech workers. If you're curious about what H-1B wages are like near you, you can look them up here: http://www.flcdatacenter.com/

Secondly, speaking as a co-founder of a startup, I can assure you that the skills gap is extremely real. Merely having a CS degree does not impart you with some magical ability to write quality software. The world is full of really terrible coders, and almost no good ones. It is extremely hard to hire right now.

Do companies make money from their proprietary instant messengers? Is it just ad revenue? Every person I know either uses Gaim or Trillian or doesn't click on ads that show up in AOL IM.

You don't know a statistically relevant sample, I promise :-) The vast majority of users use the proprietary clients. A tiny minority of those (less than 1%) click on the ads that are placed around the client. However, a 1.1% CTR is pretty much the industry average for any type of online ad, and the volumes of ads shown are absolutely staggering -- hundreds of millions of views.

On top of that, the ads themselves are often for products sold by the same company -- MSN advertises hotmail, Yahoo! advertises its various premium services, both of the aforementioned plus AOL use their clients to sell mobile ringtones and music. These things are very profitable, and are more than sufficient to pay for the relatively modest costs of keeping the relevant servers going and paying the salaries of the development teams.

1984? No, 1984 is wrong. Remember, everyone in 1984 knows they're suppressed.
No, the book that scares me more and more every day is Brave New World.
And I don't even live in America (thank God).