[asterisk-biz] OT: Anti-dumping laws?

This is partially off topic, as it's not strictly Asterisk-related...

I know the anti-dumping laws in the US manufacturing and trade
industries are geared toward international suppliers and protection of
US companies. I'm curious, though, are there similar laws for technology
(and, if not, should there be)?

I was thinking about this this morning as I read the news about the
first non Grand-Central users getting the Google Voice invites, and as I
was going over the Google Voice services. One of them is calls to
anywhere in the US for free, and it got me wondering. Currently, Google
Voice has no ads, so there's no incoming revenue to offset the cost of
termination to US phone lines. Which means, in essence, that Google is
likely giving this service away purely as a loss-leader to grab users
and drive out competition. Will the terms change later on? Hard to say.
Like all things Google, the service will likely remain tagged 'Beta'
long after it's one of the top-used services on the Internet.

Would then Skype be able to come back and do the same thing as an effort
to recapture any lost users? Or would that fall under some sort of
anti-dumping umbrella because it's now a foreign company that's giving
services away below cost?

Do services even have similar legal fair-trade protections?

Any ideas about the whole thing?

N.

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