From FB group Bell Telephone…
Ars Technica article link at the end.
Me:
You’re right, Ed. I’m also on another old timer’s group and someone brought up the days we were coming in from gym class in high school, and we had a hard time breathing because of the smog here in the LA basin. The car companies gave us a consistent product that worked. And we would be still having difficulty breathing if the AQMD and CARB had not enforced air quality laws that made car makers put pollution control on automobiles. Times changed and the companies weren’t keeping up. I didn’t say AT&T was like VW and trying to get away with violating the laws. I’m just saying it was more in the interests of the consumers the way it turned out.
I used to use a dial-up modem. We might still be using them if things had stayed the same.
In fact, we might not have been able to use dial-up modems if the courts had not decided against AT&T in the Carterfone decision. We might not have had even acoustic modems. 😱
I’ve been reading this 2008 article about the Carterfone Decision, and I found that its principles are *still* being applied to business by the FCC. I quote (and I couldn’t have said it better):
“A 1999 FCC policy paper noted the significance and justly gave the agency credit for the proliferation of this application. “The Carterfone decision enabled consumers to purchase modems from countless sources,” the agency concluded. “Without easy and inexpensive consumer access to modems, the Internet would not have become the global medium that it is today.””
Further:
“But a good idea doesn’t enforce itself. If Skype’s petition to the FCC asking the agency to apply Carterfone principles to the mobile Internet prevails, it will be because hundreds of thousands of citizen/consumers have made it clear to the government that it must. It is not acceptable, as Skype argues, for the big telcos to use their influence over handset design “to maintain control over and limit subscribers rights to run software communications applications of their choosing.” But it won’t actually be unacceptable unless consumers exercise enough control over the regulatory process to make it so.
In the end, Carterfone says that it is our telecommunications system, not AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast’s. We finance the system with our subscription, application, and investment money. We support it with utility easements, regulatory breaks, and government contracts paid for by our taxes. We make it work because we are its workers. We make it exciting with our innovations, technical and social, big and small.
We do not begrudge the CEOs of these great corporations their legal positions. But they are, as Andrew Carnegie would put it, stewards of the system, not its owners. They are not there to tell us to Go Away. They are there to keep the system running while we discover it, use it, develop it, innovate it, game it, finesse it, and reinvent it to our heart’s content. The great enterprise of telecommunications is no better than our right to participate in it as individuals.”
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2008/06/carterfone-40-years/
