Actually, there is a distinction to the carrier.

Text messages are an interesting one. Essentially, they cost nothing to the carrier in that they get transmitted as part of the control channel. However, there is a cost to supporting a phone idling on a network. The control channel has to be in communication with it using up bandwidth. So, the SMS gets put in with the control channel instructions and so its marginal cost is 0, but there's still a cost. Beyond that, your carrier has to pay a termination fee to the receiving carrier when you send a text message to them and that is a cost. So, when you send a text message off-network, there is a cost to your carrier.

Voice similarly travels a different path. In CDMA systems, the voice channel and data channel are physically separate. Even with UMTS where the voice and data traffic travels over the same channel, there have been significant advancements for data transmission (HSPA, HSPA+) that allow for greater efficiency.

Even with VoIP, a real distinction can be made. Like texting, the carrier of the receiving party charges a termination fee to the carrier of the calling party. So, if you're on Verizon and call a user on Sprint, Sprint charges Verizon to connect the call (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Termination_rates). That means that while VoIP would use network resources in the same way as data, the carrier would face a higher cost because of the termination rate. This is also why many free VoIP services won't let you call those free conference call services (http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/25/att-says-google-voi...). They're usually set up with a carrier who charges an absurd termination rate that pays for the service.

While they are travelling through the same towers, they're taking different paths and those different paths do have different costs. Part of it is regulatory: termination fees are meaningful costs to carriers even if one considers them artificial. Part of it is the current time: in 3-5 years, we'll probably be on VoIP. Part of it is that data transmission (wired or wireless) has low marginal costs, but decent fixed costs: it doesn't cost the carrier much to support you as a marginal user, but they have put tens of billions into their network even if your phone just idles on it. Right now, wireless is priced in a "consumer" way. We don't pay for what we use, but rather some awkward approximation based on what they think consumers will accept charges for. This is in contrast to, say, utilities which usually have a fixed charge for being on the network (to cover fixed costs) and then a usage rate (which covers marginal costs).

I don't really have a conclusion. Carriers are trying to make more money off you in a way that's objectionable, but they aren't the same. I won't defend the pricing, but I want to point out the difference.

Technological progress should cause increasing economic inequality, because the bottom end of the scale is firmly anchored at zero (someone taking a vacation), while technology gives the top end ever more powerful levers.

So the interesting question is not why economic inequality is increasing, but why for a few decades in the mid twentieth century the trend was reversed.

There are probably several factors at work here, but as someone who was around and paying attention at the end of that period, I think the key to the answer is the large corporation. The period of flattening coincides with the heyday of the large corporation.

Large corporations tend to decrease economic inequality. You can't measure individual productivity well within large organizations, and even if you could, it would strain the fabric of the organization to reward people that way. They also hide a lot of inequality by giving elite employees benefits that don't show up in their salaries (http://paulgraham.com/ladder.html).

What happened at the end of the 1970s was that the most ambitious people started to lose interest in working their way up the corporate ladder. They wanted to get paid upfront. That was why the term "yuppie" was born then. Before 1980 it was rare to find young professionals with lots of money. In the old days, they were all still paying their dues at that age.

I remember the transition quite clearly. When I was a little kid, in the early 70s, the most impressive thing you could do was to work for a large corporation. It was the era of conglomerates in shiny office towers. By 1980 we were starting to see a glimpse of the world we now live in, where the ambitious people are all free agents.