An interesting little snippet of news from the colonies:

Tonight in New York City, CEO John Legere said that the network is expanding home data coverage for Simple Choice customers to include more than 100 countries -- from Anguilla to Vietnam-- at no additional charge. Voice calls, meanwhile, will cost 20 cents per minutes in those same countries. "Wherever, Whenever," right? The new global data offering will go into effect starting October 31st, and T-Mobile says customers with qualifying plans won't need to sign up or pay a fee to access basic service. Legere declined to detail free speeds, but we'd expect 2G performance -- enough to use text-based apps like Twitter and email, but insufficient for media consumption.

For those of you who don't grok techspeak, that's the company announcing the end of data and call roaming. The idea that you should get charged a fortune if you leave the country where you normally reside. All done purely by market forces: they think that some customers will like this, like this enough that they will switch over to this provider and that they will therefore make more money.

Then we have events on this side of the Pond:

Neelie's plan is to get rid roaming charges across Europe by forcing operators to scrape them altogether, or offer customers the almost-impractical option of an Alternative Roaming Partner, but operators won't give up on their revenue stream so easily and are lobbying to water down the legislation before it goes to the vote. Speaking at the FT-sponsored Summit in Brussels, the unelected VP of the European Commission, told operators that the Net Neutrality and roaming-free legislation would increase investment and drive innovation, despite temporarily hitting profit margins.

Yes, the bureaucrat is going to insist, by law, that the companies must do what we can already see free market competition will bring if only the bureaucrats let it.

Which brings me to one of my suspicions about all politics and politicians. When they're being the most vehement about how something must be done it's usually because they know that whatever it is is going to happen with or without their intervention. They must therefore intervene otherwise how would they be able to claim credit for it happening, or even how could they, sans intervention, show us all how necessary they are?