The Minnesota Public Utilities Commission knows it knows more than you do. It knows what telephone service is, and woe be you if your definition is different than its because the commission has the law on its side.

The group recently concluded that at least one voice-over-Internet service is actually a telephone service  deserving of regulation rather than yet another information service running over the Internet. In case you did not know already, using the words "regulation" and "innovation" in the same sentence is a challenge.

It seems that someone at the Minnesota Department of Commerce saw an ad for Vonage , a voice-over-IP provider, thought it looked a lot like an ad from a telephone company and complained to the PUC. Ostensibly, the Commerce Department was worried that Vonage did not do the right thing when it came to supporting 911 emergency calls. A spokesperson for the Commerce Department was quoted as saying that Vonage should not be permitted to operate in Minnesota if its 911 implementation was not up to standards. And, by the way, Minnesota has a bunch of taxes that apply to phone services, and the state is involved in setting the rates for phone services.

There are a number of intertwined issues here:

• 911 services depend on knowing where someone is. This is easy when there is a dedicated wire for the phone service, hard to impossible when someone can plug the phone into any Internet connection anywhere in the world.

• Even if Vonage could tell the emergency folks exactly where the caller is, it would not be compatible with the emergency systems because they depend on receiving a phone number that they look up in a database to find a street address.

• Vonage does not advertise that it provides 911 service (but it does seem to have some way to provide something like it), so should the company be required to provide something it does not advertise?

• When does a voice interaction application become a phone service - is voice-enabled instant messaging a phone service that needs to support 911?

• How much of this is actually the regulators trying to protect the incumbent phone companies and the revenue streams from them?

When there was only one phone company in any an area, there might have been a good reason for the regulators to define what services that phone company had to offer and at what price. But because the Internet lets an infinite number of companies and individuals offer the equivalent of phone service in the same area, is the regulation still needed to protect the consumer? Real competition between providers pushes innovation and lowers prices. Somehow I don't think it's likely that regulations from the PUC will have the same effect.