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Comment by veerabadhra | Hacker News Reader

The anti trust break up of AT&T led to disruptive innovation, like mass produced cell phones. I personally can't wait for the AI revolution that will occur when Google is broken up. The Big Tech incumbents need to die out, because innovation stagnates in these monopolies.

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That "break up", especially when considered together with the Act of '96, was a long con. Outside investors poured billions into "competitive" telcos, yet today the replacement for Ma Bell is two Daughters Bell plus a few scattered also-rans. In the meantime they got rid of common carriage, lots of PUC rules, limits on broadcast monopolies, etc. The monopoly profits they stole on the wireline side funded their anti-competitive merger spree on the wireless side. We don't have to wait for the inevitable merger between ATT and VZN to call this a giant failure.

AT&T was a government granted monopoly - it was illegal to compete with them, it's not at all relevant.

> innovation stagnates in these monopolies

Bell Labs managed to come up with a couple of interesting things, though.

We also lost Bell labs.

Google and Facebook are amongst the most important sponsors of scientific research in the world. Why would you want to destroy that. The internet is a winner take all industry , all things considered the current winners are pretty good. Why ruin that for narrow political goals

> all things considered the current winners are pretty good

Quite literally, the representatives of >50% of the country disagree with you.

How much consideration do you think the average representative put into their decision?

Quite a bit I'd imagine. Many have been talking about this for months

Extraordinary

Yeah for the political reasons outlined by the original posters. I happen to think those are bad reasons , me being in the minority does not necessarily make me wrong

The government made it illegal to compete with AT&T. Their monopoly position was not the result of free market capitalism.

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