That was easily the most misinformed article I have ever read on tc. I'm not even sure where to begin. About the only thing that is right is that services will be moving to the application layer in the long run because there are benefits the abstracting the network. But the idea that the people providing the data link upon which every service you care about depends on are becoming irrelevant is so absurd it makes me laugh. Where would apple and google be and where are they going without them?
They're "irrelevant" if people can easily switch to a similarly-priced competitor and have everything keep on working as it did before. Once the network is abstracted, the companies providing that network become interchangeable, and therefore about as relevant as the company that picks up your garbage each week.
The key word there is if (in the first sentence). I doubt it.
Telcos/ISPs are headed the way of utility companies. They are natural oligopolies because the barrier to entry is too huge for there to be many competitors and it's in everyone's interest to have them functioning well and at least partially profitable, so don't be surprised if they get subsidized or even nationalized.
The companies that pick up one's garbage happen to be cities in most cases. So as stated above, here you might even be right--if by irrelevant you mean, that we take them for granted yet are still extremely important (eg, without electricity we would have little, without garbage services we would die sooner, etc...)
