Google's message for regulators

From Tom Hazlett: Google's message for regulators. Excerpt:

They also underscore the limits of government regulation. By offering 2 GB for the price of 100 MB, the competitive rivalry now on display highlights the implausibility of administratively determined efficiency. The e-mail market looked perfectly functional and workably competitive to antitrust analysts prior to the recent seismic shifts. Innovation by decentralised entrepreneurs has revealed a new competitive equilibrium some orders of magnitude north. And these volcanic eruptions were triggered by Google, a company not known to be in the e-mail business.

The insight produced is not that markets out-perform Soviets, or that market entry can be surprising and tumultuous - all of which is true, but not news. The remarkable aspect of this emerging war over e-mail service is that it is fought at the core of markets judged by many to be wracked by monopoly, resistant to change and immune to challenge.