The first time I used Skype, it was illegal to make a phone call through the Internet in SA.I wrote an article in the now defunct ThisDay in September 2004 which carried a photograph of me that looked like an arrest mugshot, with the placard "Skype user" instead of the usual police case number. (The idea was business editor Kevin Davie’s.) "Every day I break the law," I wrote. "And I love it."A series of recent articles about Skype’s various problems reminded me of how Internet telephony was then — outlawed in SA, as the department of communications upheld a law that gave Telkom a monopoly on all forms of telecommunications, except cellular.The law was passed to make it attractive for the foreign telecoms firms that bought into Telkom, and gave them an anticompetitive advantage you’d never see passed by any competitive agency now. Skype was the first of the services that used the Internet to make a call, known as Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP)."Holding back the tide of innovati...
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