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TB — (archived)

A government-controlled monopoly is not "private," no matter what you stick on the label.

For years you could only deal with the one phone company. You had to lease equipment from them, unless you got some special dispensation to actually buy something. If you discounted differences in color, the entire array of phones available to the average person could have been laid out on a large kitchen table. The system worked, and pretty reliably, but that was about it. Picture a Yugo with decent engineering.

I don't remember how the subject came up in an architecture class, but I thought there should be deregulation and competition in the industry, and that the market would work better than the current system. The main reason I was hooted down was because it was declared to be impossible for there to be true competition in the phone industry, because the infrastructure like wires and cabling couldn't really be shared. And as we all know, you can't have phone service without wires or cables, any more than you can get TV without cables, right?

Ma Bell was busted up for monopolistic practices, oddly enough, and the communications market was opened up. The results are all around us.

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