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> it was a good thing AT&T was dismantled

Citation needed. I hear this repeated, but the consumer experience was it was split into regional monopolies, and consumers now had to deal with both local and long distance, and both were still monopolies. It only got better with competition from mobile providers.




Long distance was not a monopoly once competitors came along that provided better and cheaper service, all before the rise of mobile.


I was looking for a citation and instead found a number of vague or biased papers.

Suprisingly there’s an archived DoJ page that says that the same remedies may have been much cheaper to achieve through other means.

https://www.justice.gov/archives/atr/att-divestiture-was-it-...

YMMV. I don’t agree with the narrowness of this analysis, and would like to see some links to academic studies in economics and the study of innovation tbh.


The consumer experience was AT&T telling you to go fuck yourself. Everyone hated them with a burning passion.




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