The NEW At &T??

Does anybody remember "Ma Bell"??

I was in high school back in the early 80's when this gigantic company was broken up into litte "mini-bells" due to fears of this giant being a monopoly (and thus stifling competition within the telecom indsustry). Well, I guess the "kids" decided it was too rough out there and so one by one they are coming back to roost at home with good old "Ma"....

Now it seems that my local phone company which used to be called "Ameritech" and was recently rebranded into "SBC" a few years back has now become "The New AT &T powered by SBC". And then I found out a few weeks ago that this "new" company is also about to swollow up another one of the "Baby Bells" called Bell South.

I don't get it. Is history forgetting what was done for the benifit of all of us with that break up way back then??
It seems that alot of companies that were once in competition with each other (thus keeping prices lower for all of us) are joining together and creating giant "monopolies" once again. With the phone companies, alot of this "reconstituting" is due to the 1996 telecommunications act which deregulated alot of rules for this company.
I fear the FCC made a BIG mistake with this act and now what could be a rather expensive future for our telecommunications needs.
Welcome to the new era of $100.00 monthly internet bills and $300.00 cable bills. I fear it is not far off if all of these companies continue to "morph" together.
Lets just hope that the few phone companies that are left that are NOT part of this mega merger can keep some competition going for a little bit....

A little history on AT &T and why the break up came about in the first place is linked to below.
A quote from the article: The merger is ironic in the fact that one of the "Baby Bells" grew to the strength to buy out "Ma Bell" AT&T. A further irony is that the government, which mandated the breakup of the original monopoly AT&T in the first place, gave the go-ahead to allow AT&T to reconstitute much of itself in this merger.
Click on link below (info from Wikipedia):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AT_and_T

I have also included an interesting editorial on this subject from another email newsletter I subcribe to. This guy says alot of what I have been thinking on this subject.
Read on....
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Turning Back The Clock On The Internet
It was just over 22 years ago, January 8, 1984, that U.S. District Judge Harold Greene broke up AT&T.
That was long before the Internet came along, but even then it was obvious that the market dominance of AT&T was operating to keep costs high and innovation low in telephone service.
While AT&T pointed with pride to Bell Labs, it also kept the status quo on service.

You have to wonder if we would have answering machines, fax machines, modems, cellular service, DSL and VoIP if Judge Greene hadn't acted. Remember, before the breakup we had no choices in local and long-distance phone service, and couldn't even own our own telephones. And would we have the Internet? That's one of those "what would have happened if . . . " questions.

I'm sure that if AT&T hadn't been broken up the history of the Internet would have been very different. It would have been locked down tighter than your granny's girdle and everything would come with a cost attached.

The interesting thing is that we're going to have a chance to find out, because with AT&T's acquisition of BellSouth history is about to repeat itself.
Like some monster in a creepy horror flick AT&T has reassembled itself from its scattered parts under bully-boy CEO Ed Whitacre Jr.

The landscape looks very different in some ways. Telecommunications technology has blossomed -- ISPs and cellphones and broadband and DSL and VoIP. There is even some limited choice in service providers.
But economic concentration in the industry is arguably greater than ever.
MCI and GTE, which were independent companies when Judge Greene broke up AT&T, have been sucked in.

Only two corporate entities involved in the anti-trust decision remain in any way independent, Cincinnati Bell and Qwest, which started out as Baby Bell US West. The only reason they're not part of AT&T is that they'd be more trouble to own than they're worth.

Whitacre has made his plans clear. He wants to put the brakes on technological advancement in this country by prohibiting municipal Wi-Fi, and privatize the Internet by charging companies for access to their customers.

Will Ed Whitacre be able to drag the United States back from technology leadership, back to the bad old days of monopoly telecom? That depends. If we do nothing, he'll win.
If we demand that the government block the BellSouth acquisition, and demand that the Congress pass Senator Ron Wyden's bill to prohibit Internet network operators from charging companies for faster delivery of their content, we might have a chance of holding onto the Internet.

David DeJean
Editor,
Desktop Pipeline
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A good Saturday to all....