The possibility is investigated that Coulomb forces are emergent forces. More precisely, the hypothesis is that Coulomb forces are carried by transversely polarized photons. Omission of the longitudinal and scalar photons removes some of the difficulties of standard QED. The second modification is the introduction of reducible representations of the canonical commutation and anti-commutation relations. Its main effect is that integrations over the wave vectors are postponed to the moment of evaluation of expectation values. In this way the problem of ultraviolet divergences becomes manageable. An overview of the theory is presented and some experimental consequences are discussed.