jr conlin's ink stained banana

As someone who watched Ducktales in middle school, I only sense the peripheral irony of Ma Bell reintegrating.

Why did it get split apart, anyway? Monopoly?

Yep, it got caught in the crosshairs of anti-monopoly legislation brought up by MCI and Sprint (among others). Those companies were being excluded from a great many regions and services because Ma Bell simply wouldn't let them in.

Mind you, I'm split about the breakup, since Bell Labs did fantastic stuff, but the rest of Bell was about as big a bully as any major monopoly ever was. As a f'rinstance, if you wanted a phone, you had to rent it from Bell. You could not legally buy a phone and attach it to their network, and if they ever found out you did, they'd boot you from the network. That changed eventually, and you could buy an "after market" phone (after the court cases were settled), but the biggest providers of equipment? Bell.

Well, that made sense — they'd already hit the ground running as far as research into phone hardware.

I wonder how it's gonna go now, though — the landscape's a bit different in the last ten years with cellphones, net-telephony and the like. Big Bell likely won't have the iron grip it used to, regardless of consolidation.

I, for one, salute our new/old…

Oh wait, this isn't Slashdot. Never mind.

It won't be quite as easy, but don't forget, the ever consolidating baby bells have a HUGE market still, and most of the major cell providers (Cingular, Verison, etc.) are already owned by a baby bell. MCI/WorldComm/MCI is pretty much out of the running, leaving Sprint as the only non-Bell that's doing anything major. Lump in the discussions that folks are having about a tiered Internet and you start to see some serious issues.

The interesting part is that my LBOC (Qwest) is about the only one without a suitor in this dance of consolidation.