Skype is killing long distance, one minute at a time

The Internet is a great deflator, squeezing out the middlemen and lowering prices. The shifting fortunes of Wall Street brokers and travel agents are good examples. However, the Internet’s deflationary impact is on full display in the international long-distance market, where Skype has started to take away any and all growth from the phone companies. Skype (now a division of Microsoft), which at its very basic level is a people-to-people connectivity service, has become everything the phone companies feared it for. The latest data from research firm TeleGeography shows that international voice traffic — typically the most lucrative part of a phone company’s business — is declining sharply. The declines are coming at a time when the prices of long-distance calls are heading south.