What’s the market failure here? You have a reliable and affordable service, with millions of willing buyers using it daily. Wireless telephony is one of the most competitive and innovative areas of the global economy.

Why do you think there’s a pricing conspiracy? Tacit collusion – reacting publicly to your competitors’ public announcements – is legal and appropriate. But carriers vary from list prices all the time – when I negotiated my last contract I got 300 free SMS/month without even asking.

I imagine that in their SMS pricing, carriers attempt to capture the considerable value of the product to consumers, and also to recover the cost of supporting inter-carrier messaging.

And what’s wrong with great profit margins? They measure how good a job the company is doing of serving its customers!

The job of government in a free market is to ensure that companies are remaining competitive. In a case like this, they come in and figure out why the companies appear to be price fixing (illegal) and displaying anticompetitive behavior (really, really illegal).

I don’t think the Senator is proposing that they start running things from Washington or pass any new laws, they are simply investigating a place where the laws appear to have been broken. You can’t assume that every time there is an antitrust inquiry that it is part of some liberal conspiracy to kill the free market.

With apologies to Milton Friedman: If Kohl and the Senate ran things, we’d have an SMS shortage within weeks.