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Comment by duaneb | Hacker News Reader

It's not the job of the government to make companies less shitty, it's their job to protect the free market so OTHER companies can reduce the shittiness of e.g. comcast. This is just the first step.

I'd also like to point out that splitting up Ma Bell hardly solved the problem.

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The split up of Ma Bell was a huge part of the story of the history of computer communications. Remember, AT&T owned the whole system, including the wires in you home or office and the actual phones. Prior to the breakup, you had to be granted permission to connect any equipment to the phone system. One of the primary reasons people used Acoustic Coupled modems was so that Ma Bell did not have to get involved in the approval and installation of your equipment.

I well remember installing my first modem with an RJ11 jack in the early 1980's. As a 14 year old, I remember feeling quite the rebel for not getting AT&T's approval.

Actually, the Carterfone decision (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carterfone#Landmark_regulatory_...) allowed attachment of lawful devices to the AT&T network.

I remember renting my phone from AT&T. Premium colors and touchtone were extra. They would periodically ring your line to measure the voltage drop to detect unauthorized phones.

And that is why you would disconnect the Bell on all the "extra" phones. ;)

Fascinating and informative! Thanks!

I had no idea it was this bad, as I am from the UK.

It was almost that bad in pretty much all European countries too. Including the UK. Prior to the start of deregulation in 1981 you could only rent your phone from BT, and BT/the Post Office had sole authority to decide what could be attached to the network.

Starting from 1981, standardized sockets were introduced to allow people to buy and attach third party equipment, and BSI took over the responsibility for setting the standards for what equipment could be attached.

(And you can still rent your phone from BT if you prefer: http://bt.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/13012/~/is-it... )

Ah I was born mid80s so grew up after the deregulation. My brother once moved into a flat where the previous tenant had rented their phone from BT but moved without telling them, leading to many threatening letters from BT regarding the phone.

One thing I am surprised about these days is how RUBBISH home phones are. Given the advances in cheap mobile phone technology and the finishes/quality even on cheap devices, home phones still feel like toys and have abysmal quality and no features - I would love to pair a bluetooth headset to a base station and wander around but apparently this is entirely beyond the normal use patterns envisioned by manufacturers. It's very frustrating - I almost want to go back to a 1980s polyoxybenzylmethylenglycolanhydride rotary phone.

The opposite use case is covered. They do make base stations you can pair with your cell phone as a bluetooth headset.

It depends on your definition of "bad." The Ma Bell monopoly certainly constrained your ability to even hook your own equipment to their wiring for many years and resulted in an uncompetitive market in terms of pricing. Even intra-state long distance was very expensive by today's standards. (Though some of that was a function of the technology economics as well.) On the other hand, it just worked. US telephone service was extremely reliable.

> It's not the job of the government to make companies less shitty, it's their job to protect the free market so OTHER companies can reduce the shittiness of e.g. comcast.

While you're correct you also need to remember that it was the government who helped create many of these monopolies in the first place. Trying to force the market to become more open for smaller companies arguably could have been the best move to make. But that doesn't really matter now.

"I'd also like to point out that splitting up Ma Bell hardly solved the problem."

Really ? I'm not an expert, but one item that comes to mind is that my children have never heard the term "long distance" and never will. That's pretty swell.

Ma Bell's children went on to do the exact same thing with cable and broadband.

So... it sounds like we need to do the exact same thing again.

But you're advocating the opposite. Why?

Separate infrastructure and service. Require companies to sell access to the infrastructure a wholesale price to anybody who wants in. This way it allows for new entrants to the market who can find different ways of packaging the wholesale price at lower cost to the consumer without requiring them to build infrastructure.

(The service part of the infrastructure company pays the same wholesale price as everybody else so that there are no advantages to owning both)

This is the model that a lot of European countries with post privatization telecoms monopolies went with and has worked surprisingly well and has kept prices low.

Or if you are building infrastructure on taxpayer dollar keep it public like they keep almost everything else. Depends on location, but usually power lines are public but maintained by a private contracted company, roads are public but are maintained either by subcontracted engineering corps or state public unionized engineers, sewer lines are public, etc.

It seem we only think that twisted pair / coaxial / fiber channels should cross everyones private property but stay privately owned. On average at least. I know a lot of backwards thinking that leads to the privatization of other infrastructure (water, power, etc) that leads to tremendous exploitation of the citizenry by the monopoly provider.

This is exactly what the Baby Bells are required to do with their lines. This is why you sometimes see small regional DSL providers - they're leasing the lines from the Baby Bell and reselling them.

That might also be why the two companies doing really shady net neutrality stuff are both cable providers rather than DSL providers - the DSL providers wouldn't be able to get away with it.

Breaking up a company will be no means guarantee fair access in any given location.

Broadly speaking we've slowly gotten closer to the monopoly status again which is why we are seeing this now.

http://eon3emfblog.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/ATT-Reborn...

"long distance" charges continued for a long time after the split up. I'm not convinced that the splitup was a causal factor at all with regards to those going away.

(As a reference, my most recent landline also had long distance charges just a couple of years ago. Getting unlimited was cost prohibitive relative to the benefit.)

Agreed. There's a great documentary on this called "Long Distance Warrior". It's about the MCI court case against Ma Bell/ATT.

Was on PBS a while back, but think it's uploaded as a private Youtube video somewhere.

I'd like to argue that splitting up Bell succeeded so utterly that it's time to break up some of the modern incarnations of the Baby Bells.

Back in the day, you could make a person to person collect call knowing they would refuse to accept the charges. You would do this to signal that you safely arrived after a long trip...etc. You could also encode information in the name you told the operator was making the call.

"the free market" is like saying "the world peace". your ideological slip is showing.

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