On Mon, Dec 11, 2017 at 1:17 PM, Paul Winalski <paul.winalski@gmail.com> wrote:

On 12/6/17, Jon Steinhart <jon@fourwinds.com> wrote:
>
> There's another aspect of this that I think that many people misunderstand
> which is that Judge Green gave AT&T exactly what they wanted. AT&T knew
> that in the future the money was in data and were willing to trade their
> monopoly for that business. From their perspective, it worked. For the
> rest of us, not so good.

Except that the new AT&T, liberated from the regulatory chains of the
Bell operating companies, never learned how to compete in the free
market. They got their clock cleaned by the competition. In
desperation they bought Olivetti and only managed to run it into the
ground

To be fair you are both right. I think at the time Charlie Brown and Team at AT&T wanted to make a go at IBM and DEC (i.e. large systems) and Paul's right, they missed.

But Jon is right that they had realized that it going to be a data centric business and he and his team felt that the current consent decree we going to keep them from being players in it.

To me there were a couple of issues. The Phone System and 'TPC' was centrally controlled (a lot like a communist country). Where it worked, it was fine. But... the problem was that anything outside their view of reality was a threat. It's funny as the time, IBM, DEC et al were trying to build centrally managed (closed garden networks) too, just like the phone system, so it was not a stretch for them the think that way.

IP and datagrams were very much built on no central control, which was something TPC thought was bad and fought. I remember so, so many of those fights at the time and trying to explain that IP was going to win. In the end, it was MetCalfe's law (which was formulated on observations about the phone system) that caused IP to win, along with "Clark's Observation" making everything a "network of networks" instead if a single managed system - which made the plumbing work.

So while I find it sad to see Comcast, Current version of AT&T, Verizon et al, all want to see the net neutrality go away, I do not find it surprising. Its the same behavior as before.

What would have happened if Judge Green had not broken them up? I do think broadband would be more universal, but .... I suspect AT&T would have fought it and tried to use things that dreamed up (ATM, ISDN, et al).

My 2 cents....

Clem