I haven’t used Skype in years, and nor have many of my contemporaries, and it was only reading a reference to it by a Lib Dem peer in a debate that I remembered it still existed, but in the wake of Microsoft’s announcement that it will soon be discontinued, it’s worth remembering what the world of international telecommunications was like before it.

Having lived and travelled abroad in the 1990s, I remember when international calls were a thing, and an expensive one at that, either entailing buying phone cards or frantically feeding coins into a payphone just to get someone call you back. Indeed, it reflected the era Skype was born in that a Guardian headline referred to how it ‘disrupted the landline industry’, and while it did become available on smartphones, it still conjures up images of clunky old desktop computers.

Skype is what is known as Voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP, and while it was not the first such service, it was certainly the most user-friendly, and inexpensive, as it only required you to download a piece of free software, create an account with a user name and password, and you were free to call anyone else who had done the same. By contrast, other VoIP services required you to buy expensive bits of hardware, and even if you were willing to, how many of your friends and family were?

Its founders, Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, were no strangers to disruptive technology, having been behind the file-sharing app Kazaa, before it faced multiple lawsuits from record companies and film studios over copyright infringement. However, while creative industries could arouse public sympathy, given the cultural resonance of music and film, the same could not be said for telephone companies, which were, and still are, charging subscribers exorbitant amounts by the minute for voice calls, and were in dire need of disruption by the likes of Skype.

Traditionally, international phone calls were only possible because telecom operators in different countries had agreed to interconnect with each other, or rather, governments, because they were often state owned, and extensions of the post office. In addition, those operators were usually a monopoly, and if they weren’t, other operators were subject to licensing and regulation.

But Skype changed that; it mattered naught what country you were in, as long as you had a decent internet connection, you could use it, although some telecom operators did their best to block or throttle it. In addition, you were not completely cut off from the POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) as you could buy credit to make outbound calls to regular phone numbers, and receive inbound calls on a regular phone number in the country of your choice.

However, the novelty wore off over time, and as rival services emerged, especially those intended for smartphones from the outset; ironically, despite WhatsApp requiring its users to provide a phone number, unlike Skype, this was more a help than a hindrance, being more familiar than a user name. In addition, Skype changed hands, first being bought for US$2.6 billion by eBay in 2005, which later regretted it, before being sold to Microsoft for US$8.5 billion in 2011, making what was once a wild animal into a domesticated one, like Hotmail, the free email service, before it.

While I have never liked telecom monopolies, nor have I ever liked closed shops, which Skype essentially has been, or ‘walled gardens’ to use the industry jargon. You would find it absurd if you couldn’t use your Gmail account to email someone with a Yahoo address, or your Vodafone SIM card to phone someone on the EE network, so why should making voice or video calls between Skype and WhatsApp be any different?

Pitifully, only now is the European Union beginning to address this in its Digital Markets Act, eleven years after I raised this with my MEP, Sir Graham Watson, and fourteen years after the European Commission approved the sale of Skype to Microsoft. Like Yanis Varoufakis, the former Greek Finance minister, I think it does not go far enough when it comes to interoperability, although the fines that the Commission can impose on companies that do not comply are based on their revenue worldwide, including the UK, not just in the EU.

However, we still owe a great deal to Skype, especially back when the alternative was Alan Sugar’s Em@iler Plus phone, charging 20p to check your email!

* Ken Westmoreland is a member of the Taunton and Wellington Local Party.