The rules are out and no one is fighting to get them back. The baby bells will no longer be required to lease out their local lines to competitive local exchange carriers (CLECs) at a predetermined ?wholesale? rate. The question now remains whether or not customers will be impacted. However, I don?t think we?ll see a dramatic change. CLECs never really took off. In every major city in the US you still only see one major phone company. The only competition that really developed was around the business customers, and the gov?t wasn?t concerned their. They were trying to decrease costs of ?plain old telephone service?. Survey California and find out how many people have local POTs that is not SBC, and I bet it?s less than 5%. Besides the wave of the future is wireless. It will either be cellular or WiFi or a combination of the two. I think there are enough ways to get communication services these days that it will not negatively impact the typical John Doe, which was all the government was trying to protect earlier anyway. Besides, we?ll all be making free calls to Tibet on our Skype phone anyway.