 of telecom law and a major philosophical shift on the part of the industry at large. Yes, today would be different. Instead of the contrived, artificially competitive model that drove the industry for so long, all incumbent local exchange carriers had agreed to subject themselves to structural separation, resulting in the creation of a wholesale arm and a retail arm for each company. The wholesale arm sells infrastructure; the retail arm sells services. All competitive carriers are free to buy from the wholesale division of any of the carriers at a cost that is the same for all. And to ensure that the services delivered by the infrastructure company are as good as they can be, a well-informed over- sight committee ensures that the technology infrastructure is also as good as it can be. Of course, such an infrastructure is expensive; after all, the reason that the FCC and Congress were even willing to consider the concept was that the cost of maintaining and upgrading the infrastruc- ture to meet customer demands had become so onerously high that the service providers, faced with declining revenues on all service fronts, could not afford to make the necessary investment. So to offset the cost -this was a stroke of genius, if he did say so himself-Congress had passed a "chip and device tax," which placed a surcharge on every man- ufactured semiconductor and optoelectronic device as well as on the fin- ished product-a tax similar to the VAT used in Europe. The monies collected will pay for the Universal Service Fund and for guaranteed, scheduled network upgrades. The money also pays to guarantee Quality of Service, technological currency, and what his committee had come to call "Quality of Experience." But now he had to go-he was late for his meeting with the Global League of Service Providers. "Wake up, Steve-it's time for your pill." As my friend Paul Whalen likes to say, "My mind just had an out-of-body experience, but it's back now." You may laugh at my characterization of the regulatory environ- ment of the fu