Government Proposing Free Text

I just red an article about the Government proposing TELECOMMUNICATION companies to make SMS or Text Messaging as a free service in Sun Star.com.ph and also watched it in TV Patrol last May 27, 2008. Obviously Telecom firms opposed this government’s proposal since this would have resulted in a high decrease in revenue of these Telecom firms since most of the revenue they get is from the people who use this SMS service in exchange for money. Though some people might view this as a good idea, for me this is just the payback of the government to the Telecom companies since they were not able to exploit SMS as a source of income to the government by means of putting taxes on text messaging. The government just wants the share on the large amount of money these companies are getting. Because if the tax implementation on text messaging were implemented then the large amounts of money they would get will only be transferred to the pockets of these corrupt officials in the government. And since they failed to implement this, they did not want these companies to get richer. It is their selfishness and greed that drive them to do this. Not only that, they exploited the Filipino’s “ugali” of favoring to things that are free, “Mga bagay na libre” A common Filipino trait. They told the companies that text messaging must become a free service so that the masses would favor to their idea because they knew that these companies would obviously oppose this kind of proposal. My question is why would the government interfere in a private sector such as these private businesses, TELECOMMUNICATION companies?