Of course, by then people will be communicating via telepathy or some other technology not in use today, so us old bloggers/email addicts will be way out of step! Eric.

I send an SMS msg saying "Pls call JRBehrman" or, with the kids, "Initiate Parental Unit Link".

For twenty years, both wired and wireless networks have had a dedictated "signalling" channel as the well as the temporary voice or data channels which are "set-up" and "torn-down" call-by-call or session-by-session.

This is wildly efficient and very flexible. For instance, in emergencies, all the bandwidth can be dedicated to signalling traffic allowing both public and private msgs for maintianing calm and mobilizing responses. A few of the countries which still have a well regulated militia and a republican form of government alos have competitive market economies, in part, because they have maintained patriotic military-economic foundations.

From Finland to Isreal, military officers and reservists run and carefully maintain the PSTN, not rapacious, often foreign, paper-hangers, bean-counters, and lawyers.

The Great, World, and Cold War PSTN in North America followed this tradition and the PSTN in North America follows the same design standards as the rest of the world, yes, including France and Germany.

But, all this was sabotaged by the carriers, new and old, all of them debt-ridden, protected by corrupt civilian bankers, lawyers, and politicians, and, now, obosolete, unregulated and rapidly being consolidated in order to roll-over bad debt and to mask widespread compounding corruption.

Basically, we have the old "parallel track" problem of debt-ridded Victorian railroads built by paper-hangers and lawyers, not by military or civil engineers.

The politicians love what is now the almost universal practice, euphemized as "adding value in the network" or providing "more (bad)choices" but long called just "charging whatever the traffic will bear" previously. The carriers, wired and wireless, share monopoly rent with government in the form of indirect taxation based on inflated license fees (wireless) and property taxes (wired), also very, very generous support of incumbent politicians at every level of government.

Tell me, how did old and universal (admiralty) principles of market regulation long predating perfervid ideologies of the twentieth century -- like common carriage -- come to be tossed aside in favor of the sort of Whig Tyranny that Marx and Engels denounced in one historical context only to have Lenin and Trotsky adopt them first chance they got?

I think it was the decline of patriotic bankers, both German-Jewish and French-Jewish after World War I as well as the rise of simply piratical bond-lawyers in their place, -- you know -- the "transaction lawyers", the ultimate "contingent fee" lawyers.

Could such a thesis get a fair hearing on this site?

THE WORLD IS WONDERING