One private company, Vonage (Edison, N.J.), has been feeling the heat. It offers flat-rate Internet calling to consumers and business, and the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission recently tried to force Vonage to become a regulated telecom firm in that state. Minnesota lost the fight in the courts, but the ruling never settled the question of what is and what isn't a phone company.

Enter Michael Powell's FCC. It needs to decide once and for all what is a phone service. Right now there is a fussy distinction between phones and online communications, with the former being regulated and the latter not.

In 1998, the FCC said something was a phone service to the extent that it held itself out as a phone service; that it used telephone gear; that it interconnected with the traditional telecom network; and that it used telephone numbers to communicate.

But what if I call someone's phone over the Internet using a headset attached to my laptop? What if I call their laptop instead? What if I call from computer to computer using Microsoft's Messenger chat program, but both computers look like phones? The opportunities for confusion abound.

Incumbent telecoms are tying themselves in knots over all this. They generally think that the current wave of upstart VOIP providers are getting a free ride given that they currently don't pay the same regulator-decreed access fees and subsidies. But incumbents are also smart enough to implicitly threaten to cut and run to VOIP themselves if the FCC gives competitors free rein in profitable voice markets.

But providers of VOIP service are only slightly less cynical. While they are getting scads of fawning press now, it is hard to imagine a future that includes most of them. Because six years or so from now we will almost certainly be calling from dedicated voice devices that plug directly into your high-speed Internet connection. You are no more likely to be billed for future phone calls than you are for current e-mails.

Call it the Napsterization of the phone business, where paying VOIP companies $35 a month for the privilege of connecting you via the Internet with the spendthrift sorts on the old telecommunications network will seem silly and unnecessary. The smartest thing most VOIP vendors could do now is quickly exploit VOIP-phoria to go public or get bought. Wait, that's what they are doing.

There is work left for regulators, like ironing out 911 and 411 access, as well as how law enforcement will tap Internet phone calls. But 911 issues didn't stop cell phones, and the arrival of e-mail that police could no longer steam open rightly didn't cause e-mail to be outlawed.

Mr. Powell has an opportunity to give homes and businesses the gift of radically lower voice service costs. But if the FCC misses the point -- that the traditional voice telecommunications is a goner, and most of the noisy VOIP upstarts are merely diversions -- then we will all be like Dr. Johnny Fever, who smashed his phone in the old "WKRP in Cincinnati" television episode. We'll be on the run from the phone cops, except we'll be making free calls from our computers.