Google continues the assault on the price of a phone call

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(That may be the fault of the simple external microphone I used on my work desktop -- a giveaway from Skype's public-relations department.)

Google says more than 1 million calls were placed through Gmail in its first 24 hours. It's unclear how many of them consisted of people dialing their cellphones, recording a voicemail message to the effect of, "Hi, this is me calling through Gmail," and then hanging up.

Google won't say whether domestic calling will remain free, but it's structured this service and Google Voice to stay afloat based on the profit generated by international calling.

Unlike Gmail itself and many other Google applications, advertising doesn't factor into this -- a detail that its privacy policy ought to spell out but does not.

In other words, as spokesman Randall Sarafa wrote in an e-mail Thursday, "Google absolutely does not record or listen in on phone conversations."

Placing a call through a Web browser may not be for everybody. But the ability to do this could change how even the tech-averse make and pay for phone calls.

Think about what Gmail did for e-mail: By offering effectively unlimited storage and inviting users to hold on to their old e-mail forever-- after Microsoft and Yahoo had steadily cut back on the storage offered to users of their free Web-mail services -- Google pounded the market price for each message all the way down to $0.00.

(More: see the 18 best Iphone applications)

Phone use has been edging in that direction for a while, coaxed along by steadily expanding blocks of unmetered domestic calling time on wireless plans and the growing allotments of "VoIP" services such as Skype and Vonage. Google's latest move can only accelerate that trend. Incumbent carriers will have to respond accordingly.

But don't feel too bad for the telecom firms. At least until Google or somebody else finds a way to sneak into that market, those companies seem secure in being able to charge an unhealthy premium for text messaging.

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