Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone and the company AT&T is a direct descendant of his original telephone company.
AT&T Actually had a total monopoly on telecommunications in the United States until 1982 when they were broken up in an antitrust lawsuit because of some fucked up abuse they were doing related to how they owned not just all the telephone lines but also the company that makes telephones.
AT&T was broken up into many smaller companies which... all slowly merged back together again
@shel "ma bell's alive and well"
I mean think about this. These executives were all co-workers and then oh no now we "work" for "different" companies. when Comcast bought one of the post-breakout AT&T companies what they were buying was the *people* working for that company who were connected to the other AT&T companies precisely so they could do shit like negotiate regional monopolies through back-channels. Charter and Sprint don't seem to have any connections to AT&T but people working in the same industry can easily change jobs
This could have been different though!!
In 1913 there had been another allegation conflict between AT&T and the US government due to concerns of AT&T monopolizing telecommunications. The threat *then* was that the US Government was going to nationalize AT&T. Buy them up. Make them into a government agency and telecommunications would be a publicly owned utility like the waterworks.
Now instead AT&T said they'd stop trying to own the telegraph companies and would let competitors hook up to their lines
But can you imagine if the government hadn't taken this out-of-court settlement offer? If they said "yeah that's not good enough" and nationalized the telephone networks?
Given the relationship between telephones and the development of internet infrastructure?
Likely, the internet would not have been privatized in the 90s and it would still be owned primarily by DARPA. The world would be very different in that situation.
Net Neutrality probably would be a non-issue had AT&T been nationalized in 1913; but government censorship would likely be a much much bigger concern. Internet access would likely be greater, without internet dead-zones or overpriced local monopolies... but also surveillance would be even more built into the infrastructure of the internet as a whole as the US military complex literally owned and controlled the central infrastructure
In case you're curious this comes out of me falling into a research-hole when I was curious as to who makes vrv.co and own crunchyroll
i bet you know who the answer is ;)
(a joint venture of AT&T and a former NewsGroup/Fox executive)
@shel Except the new AT&T can hardly claim to have a monopoly now. Not all of the former pieces of AT&T merged back into AT&T; some merged into Verizon (I think). AT&T actually does not even make telephones now, unless I am missing something (if anything that was spun off to Lucent).
@skquinn did you read the rest of the thread? I stated exactly that
@skquinn the "baby bells" are now AT&T, Verizon, CenturyLink, and Comcast. The telephone-manufacturing component is now owned by Nokia
@shel I replied before you sent the next message(s), sorry
The 22 "baby bells" are now AT&T, Verizon, and CenturyLink after merging together. Comcast purchased a "baby bell" as well when they entered telecommunications. The wing of AT&T that manufactured telephones is now owned by Nokia.
Charter, Comcast, Verizon, CenturyLink, and AT&T all "trade" customers to consolidate their territory and create regional monopolies. there's no competition on purpose. Charter is the only one of the top 5 ISPs to not have a direct connection to the AT&T monpoly.