If the gov't didn't have its hand in this space for so long, there would be no massive AT&T and there would be way more innovation. You're cheering someone for applying a cast when they also broke the leg.
> If the gov't didn't have its hand in this space for so long, there would be no massive AT&T
I didn't expect to see revisionism in here, let alone of such magnitude.
Without government intervention, there would be no AT&T, nor would there be alternate carriers. There would only be Ma Bell.
And don't bullshitting about Ma Bell's regulated monopoly, the regulation was put in place because Bell was already a monopoly by the time 1934 rolled around.
How about no Ma Bell in the first place... Grampa Graham got his telephone patent in 1876 then in the next 18 years there were 600 lawsuits to defend over 900 patents (state grants of monopoly).
When these patents expired, there were soon 80 competing companies which captured 5% of the market, rising to over 3,000 companies with over 50% of the market by 1900.
AT&T then lobbied for its monopoly status back, saying the telephone "by the nature of its technology would operate most efficiently as a monopoly providing universal service."
Then during WW1, this monopoly was given "for reasons of national security". If you think that the monopoly came about by market forces then government came to save us, yes there is some revision needed.
> When these patents expired, there were soon 80 competing companies which captured 5% of the market, rising to over 3,000 companies with over 50% of the market by 1900.
And starting in 1907 and the return of Vail, Bell started massively buying them out, attracting the attention of the Justice Department and leading to the Kingsbury Commitment. Kingsbury was essentially repealed 8 years later by the Willis Graham Act, which more or less removed the Commitment's regulatory barriers for acquisition by AT&T, by shifting all oversight to the ICC's rubber-stamping.
> Then during WW1, this monopoly was given "for reasons of national security". If you think that the monopoly came about by market forces then government came to save us, yes there is some revision needed.
The monopoly was already there, Bell was temporarily nationalized during WW1.
> AT&T then lobbied for its monopoly status back, saying the telephone "by the nature of its technology would operate most efficiently as a monopoly providing universal service."
And this was given in 1921 by the Willis-Graham, which removed the regulatory hurdles put in place in 1913 when Bell was already a monopoly or near-monopoly.
> Bell got big and stayed big because of gov't intervention.
That is some pretty serious misreading, Bell got big and stayed big regardless of government intervention, the government tried to keep control of it after being put before the fait accompli (before trying to break the company in '84, as you may have noticed that didn't quite work either)
Because the patent was not the only thing that created the monopoly, nor was the the most important thing in sustaining the monopoly over telecommunication services at that time. Given the nature of how the tech worked, a monopoly provider was inevitable. The patent only dictated that the name of the monopoly provider was AT&T instead of Western Union.
