Greetings. There's much media speculation that Verizon's patent ruling could actually shut down Vonage. While I view that outcome as not assured by any means, there is an important aspect to this situation that is being glossed over.

Every Vonage customer is paying two entities. They pay Vonage for the Vonage phone service, and they pay an ISP for the Internet access over which Vonage runs. And of course, thanks to consolidation and the ever shrinking number of ISPs, we can assume that very large numbers of Vonage customers in Verizon territories pay Verizon every month for DSL -- over which these customers then run Vonage. Most of these Verizon customers are probably paying full rates for the underlying phone lines as well, since "naked" DSL is not common.

So when we see stuff like " ... continued erosion of the client base and customer base [of Verizon]" we should remember that in vast numbers of cases we know that Verizon has not been cut out of the equation, and is still in there up to their eyeballs, happily demanding monthly DSL payments from Vonage customers on one hand, while trying to kill Vonage on the other.

I believe that there are definite network neutrality implications to this story, even for a case ostensibly couched in terms of a patent dispute.

--Lauren--