Allen McKinley Kitchen (gmail) wrote:
...
I don't know what got me to thinking about it earlier today but I recalled when
I started at the telephone company in Los Angeles there was a pitch made early
on that in earlier days a business in Los Angeles had to have several
telephones on desks to be able to talk to all of their customers.
Which was true ONLY because regulation required that each telephone line
terminate in an instrument owned by the providing company.
The above statement contains an error that obscures the issue. As someone who also
recalls this state of affairs, I must point out that it was the respective telcos'
"regulation" - not government regulation in any sense - that prohibited any
equipment but their own from being attached to their lines. In other words, those telcos
were behaving anti-competitively with all the power they could muster to do so
(surprise!) and also doing whatever they could to obscure that fact.
Regulation was demanded by consumers - in order to protect them from the ridiculous
results of this assertion of privilege on the telcos' part. To Mr Sheldon, this resulted
in regulation (by government) creating a monopoly. I believe Mr Gilmore might argue that
well-crafted regulation requiring interconnectivity as a public good would have prevented
both the "need" for monopoly-creating regulation and also would have protected
the public from the inherent tendency toward monopoly as vendors do battle to protect
their turf rather than provide the best possible outcome for their customers.
Actually, it goes back further than that. In the really early days, in
NY, there were lots of phone companies, and a business would have to
have one of each to serve all its customers. And long distance was just
beginning - expensive, requiring operator intervention - and AT&T long
lines wouldn't necessarily connect to non-Bell system players. It was
basically a mess.
Bell kept buying up lots of other telcos, and integrating them into a
more uniform network (remember "The Bell System") - and eventually ran
afoul of antitrust issues. Bell went to Congress and proposed a deal -
let us buy up everyone, we'll build an integrated system, including
interconnection to the independents, and you get to regulate us to
balance out our monopoly power.
Email provides an interesting contrast. In the early days, the early
timesharing vendors sold email as a feature, and the size of their user
bases as a competitive advantage. Along came Barry Shein, and the World
- pretty much forcing open some limited public access to the early
Internet, followed by Compuserve connecting to Internet email, and
suddenly market pressure pretty much forced everybody to connect their
private mail systems to the Internet.
Miles Fidelman
--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra
