Reading Time: 10 minutes Fighting the monopolies which dominate our lives is not a new game for Alex Mashinsky, As an immigrant to the US, he decided to take on AT&T which was the most profitable company in the US back then. Almost all of its profit came from international voice call settlements. Mashinsky proposed to replace the decade-old practice of charging users $3 a minute to call relatives abroad with a free internet-based service he called Voice Over Internet Protocol. Few believed such service could even work, as the entire internet was a slow and cumbersome dial-up system that used the phone network as its backbone. Mashinsky persevered though, and today over 3.bn people all over the world freely use the technology he helped pioneer.