Scandinavian duo and consumers will be the big winners

It's been a wild seven days for Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis. Last week, an Australian court crippled Kazaa - the Scandinavian duo's first revolutionary creation - by ruling that the service must be modified to end the illegal file-sharing it was fostering.

But now the pair have struck gold with eBay's US$4.1 billion offer for their second revolutionary brainchild, internet telephone sensation Skype.

They look to be coming out of the past week on the plus side. In the end, so will consumers.

While the music industry has had some success in stemming the tidal wave of free downloads over the internet, the sea change in telephony is only just beginning.

The big difference is that the music industry had a legitimate gripe - it does, after all, own the content that was being swapped for free. Telephone providers do not own their content. Conversation is free, so there is no way that telcos can stop the migration of customers to cheap or even free phone services.

The technology to provide cheap, good-quality calls over the internet is growing and improving rapidly. Here, a high-speed internet connection is needed which, in most cases, means having to subscribe to a phone line offered by Telecom. But with the rise of alternative ways of getting high-speed internet - especially wireless - that won't be the case for long.

The only option telcos such as Telecom have left is to change the way they do business or face extinction. And we get cheaper calls.