Excellent book. The telco's clearly have the incentive and power to suppress competition. In fact, they are actively doing it through their legislative influence (e.g. state bans on public broadband networks) and vertical integration with content providers (e.g. Comcast/NBCU).

The moment both Apple and Google embrace an interoperable messaging standard and include a native OS app, SMS will suffer a quick death. In the meantime, consumers will continue to be gouged. It's truly a shame that Stephenson's nightmares have not yet come true.