Leadership Quote by Michael K. Powell

Markets can run on illusion for a while, but Powell is betting that technology is a better lie detector. The first line is a blunt critique of scarcity economics: you can charge a premium on "nothing" only as long as consumers accept the story that access is rare, complicated, or naturally expensive. Then "something starts eating away at it" arrives like termites in the walls: digitization. Once communication becomes software, the old mark-ups start to look less like business models and more like tolls on a road nobody needs to take anymore.

The casual pivot to domestic routine is the real rhetorical move. "Go home and click on Yahoo" timestamps the era when the internet stopped being a lab experiment and became a living-room habit. Powell isn't painting a utopia; he's pointing to an everyday, undeniable baseline: I can speak to family for free. Not subsidized, not discounted, not a promotional gimmick - free in the way that makes traditional pricing feel almost embarrassing. The specificity ("my sister", "over a microphone") grounds the argument in lived experience rather than policy abstraction, an effective tactic for a politician trying to justify deregulation or a lighter touch on telecom and broadband markets.

Subtextually, it's an indictment of incumbents who depend on gatekeeping: long-distance fees, metered minutes, closed networks. Powell frames the internet as the solvent that dissolves those rents, implying that regulators should stop protecting legacy mark-ups and start treating connectivity as an arena where innovation, not paperwork, sets the price. The quote works because it turns a structural economic shift into a simple household comparison: if the consumer can do it for free at home, the old charge starts to sound like a scam.