The once and future AT&T

Matthew Lasar at Ars Technica has a really fascinating piece on the history of AT&T—why the company was able to become such a massive force during the 20th century, what changed that made the government step in to break up the AT&T monopoly in the '80s, and what's changed again that's enabling the company to make a bid to regain the power it once held.

Ultimately, Lasar writes, the past and the present have a lot in common. In the early 20th century and today, the company is really making the same sales pitch: Let us control the system, don't ask too many questions, and we'll make the system bigger so more Americans can get access to it.

When the antitrust hammer finally came down on AT&T in the early 1980s, it was in part because the pace of technology had overtaken the company. Even before the breakup, the FCC demanded that the corporation stop denying consumers and developers the right to freely connect devices to its network. Bell now stood in the way of too many innovators, prominently among them microwave upstart MCI, whose visionary Bill McGowan promised and delivered cheaper long distance service …

Now here we are again, the latest version of AT&T asking for a merger with T-Mobile that will effectively turn the nation's wireless broadband system into a duopoly. At least one prominent scholar of the Bell system has sounded a worried note.

"Bottom line: this is one step too far back to the days of a single telephone company," warns Milton Mueller. "If you support a competitive industry where one can reasonably expect the public and legislators to rely on market forces as the primary industry regulator, this merger has to be stopped. On the other hand, if you welcome the growing pressures for regulating carriers and making them the policemen and chokepoints for network control, a bigger AT&T is just what the doctor ordered."

And what is the doctor promising in exchange for this regulatory approval? Once again: Universal Service.

"The proposed merger with T-Mobile will result in AT&T’s ability to expand deployment of its high-speed 4G LTE network to an additional 55 million Americans," an AT&T fact sheet on the merger contends, "representing an increase from 80 percent to 97 percent network coverage of the U.S. population."