So, Vonage lost another ruling, which means we may end up having to change phone providers sometime.

Here’s what happened: Vonage made a success of VOIP precisely because it’s not an incumbent carrier. It has nothing to do with patents, and in fact if Vonage had a deeper bankroll we feel pretty sure they could prove that. Sprint, for its part, doesn’t even really care about the patents: they just want Vonage out of the marketplace precisely because Vonage did something they couldn’t or didn’t do: have success with VOIP.

As soon as Vonage goes under, if they fail, expect Sprint and the remaining oh-how-we-hate-’em telcos to offer some kind of crippled, locked-down, drastically less useful VOIP product that will cost more than Vonage’s offering. Further expect no one to enter the marketplace for fear of lawsuits from these telcos for quite some time.

As Techdirt put it in the link above:

[The incumbent carriers suing Vonage] were unable (and unwilling) to create the services that people wanted — and now they want to shut down the company that actually did innovate — and they’re likely to succeed. That’s not how the patent system is supposed to work.