Science Quote by Niklas Zennstrom

Zennstrom’s line isn’t really about phones; it’s about a moment when the internet stopped being a novelty and started behaving like infrastructure. Coming out of Kazaa, he’s speaking from the edge of early-2000s bandwidth abundance, when “always on” connections and beefier PCs made it suddenly plausible to treat voice as just another data type. The quiet provocation is in “no longer made a lot of sense”: he frames the old phone system not as beloved, regulated public utility, but as an anachronistic habit waiting to be routed around.

The context matters because Kazaa was synonymous with peer-to-peer disruption and legal heat. That pedigree gives the quote a subtext of insurgency: the same network logic that let users share music outside the control of labels could also let people communicate outside the control (and pricing power) of telecoms. By pointing to “streaming multimedia,” he’s expanding the argument beyond cheaper calls; he’s implying a whole communications stack where voice, video, and messages converge, making the legacy phone network’s circuit-switched logic feel quaint and inefficient.

Rhetorically, he uses a technologist’s inevitability narrative: rising broadband, rising compute, therefore the old model must fall. That’s persuasive because it shifts the debate away from politics and regulation and toward physics and progress. But it also smuggles in a value judgment: “traditional” doesn’t mean reliable, accessible, or accountable; it means obsolete. In that single sentence, you can hear the blueprint for Skype-era thinking: the network is the platform, the phone is just an app, and incumbents are about to be treated like middlemen.