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The Phone Business Going Back To Its Monopolistic Roots
Pay to the order of: Ameritech SBC AT&T
Paying my phone bill is getting bothersome because I keep having to change who I make the check out to.
A bit of history:
- In 1984, a landmark antitrust decision split up the telephone monopoly AT&T, with seven regional companies coming into existence to provide local telephone service, and the now-smaller AT&T company free to compete in long distance and pretty much anything else except local service.
- By last year, due to mergers and acquisitions (including SBC's 2004 purchase of Ameritech, the baby bell covering Ohio), those eight "baby bells" were down to four, the largest of which were Verizon (formerly Bell Atlantic and GTE), and SBC (formerly Southwestern Bell).
Then we have these disturbing developments:
- In November, SBC bought AT&T, its old parent company. 20 years ago nobody ever would've imagined that Southwestern Bell would eventually buy AT&T. It still blows my mind, but as far as I could see it was barely noticed outside the business pages.
- The lack of notice appears to have extended to the Bush administration's antitrust enforcers. Assuming there are any in that department.
- SBC proceeded to take AT&T's name, and a newly-modified version of the old AT&T "death star" logo, while remaining headquartered in Texas rather than in AT&T's New Jersey home. This strikes me as hubris, or maybe just plain deception.
Finally,SBC AT&T recently made a deal to buy BellSouth. So out of the 1984 octet of Ma Bell and the Seven Baby Bells, we're now down to three. Finally the press started to pay attention, and I started wondering where they were back in November. Of course, the Bush antitrust regulators still won't care.
I'm sure that at some point AT&T and Verizon will eventually merge, and we'll be basically back where we started: one behemoth doing whatever it wants, and some minor players filling in the gaps wherever they can squeeze in.
Paying my phone bill is getting bothersome because I keep having to change who I make the check out to.
A bit of history:
- In 1984, a landmark antitrust decision split up the telephone monopoly AT&T, with seven regional companies coming into existence to provide local telephone service, and the now-smaller AT&T company free to compete in long distance and pretty much anything else except local service.
- By last year, due to mergers and acquisitions (including SBC's 2004 purchase of Ameritech, the baby bell covering Ohio), those eight "baby bells" were down to four, the largest of which were Verizon (formerly Bell Atlantic and GTE), and SBC (formerly Southwestern Bell).
Then we have these disturbing developments:
- In November, SBC bought AT&T, its old parent company. 20 years ago nobody ever would've imagined that Southwestern Bell would eventually buy AT&T. It still blows my mind, but as far as I could see it was barely noticed outside the business pages.
- The lack of notice appears to have extended to the Bush administration's antitrust enforcers. Assuming there are any in that department.
- SBC proceeded to take AT&T's name, and a newly-modified version of the old AT&T "death star" logo, while remaining headquartered in Texas rather than in AT&T's New Jersey home. This strikes me as hubris, or maybe just plain deception.
Finally,
I'm sure that at some point AT&T and Verizon will eventually merge, and we'll be basically back where we started: one behemoth doing whatever it wants, and some minor players filling in the gaps wherever they can squeeze in.