TELECOM Digest OnLine - Sorted: Re: Last Laugh! Western Union's Comment About Useless Phones

Re: Last Laugh! Western Union's Comment About Useless Phones

Jim Haynes (haynes@alumni.uark.edu)
Thu, 07 Jul 2005 23:07:27 GMT

> [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: No one, it seems, had their hands
> totally clean in the Bell divestiture. Far from being a 'visionary'
> be dismantled. We know for a fact that Harold had been approached by
> some friends in the Justice Department as a judge who would likely
> be sympathetic to their cause (the breakup of Bell) so apparently
> that ...

The government had been on Bell's case for a long time. There is a book
published in 1941, "The Bell Telephone System" by Arthur W. Page, in
which he, a Bell insider, tells all the virtues of the telephone system
being a regulated monopoly rather than a competitive bunch of companies.
He complains a lot about the government back then having a grudge against
the Bell System. There was a paper published in a legal journal after
the breakup titled "Is the Third Time the Charm? A Comparison of the
Government's Major Antitrust Settlements with AT&T This Century"
(by Geoffrey M. Peters, Seton Hall Law Review, 1985, p. 252.)
This discusses the circa 1920 case, the case that ended in the 1956
consent decree, and the case that Judge Greene handled. I believe the
first of these dealt with the Bell System trying to drive the independent
telcos out of business and acquire them.

jhhaynes at earthlink dot net

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