From owner-freebsd-chat Thu Aug 9 18:22:58 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Received: from germanium.xtalwind.net (germanium.xtalwind.net [205.160.242.5]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 8367C37B405 for ; Thu, 9 Aug 2001 18:22:53 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from jack@germanium.xtalwind.net) Received: from localhost (localhost.xtalwind.net [127.0.0.1]) by germanium.xtalwind.net (8.11.5/8.11.4) with ESMTP id f7A1Mj547294; Thu, 9 Aug 2001 21:22:45 -0400 (EDT) (envelope-from jack@germanium.xtalwind.net) Date: Thu, 9 Aug 2001 21:22:45 -0400 (EDT) From: jack To: Mike Meyer Cc: Subject: Re: Why anti-trust law? In-Reply-To: <15219.2554.597252.164723@guru.mired.org> Message-ID: <20010809211158.T46275-100000@germanium.xtalwind.net> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Today Mike Meyer wrote: > As for AT&T - the government set it up as a monopoly because they > decided universal, interoperable phone service would be a good > idea. The government mandated price structure had long distance and > business users subsidizing low-end residential users to achieve that > goal. A lot of people complain that the breakup caused a lot of > headaches - which it did - and was thus a bad thing. I doubt that we'd > be able to buy long distance at 2 cents/minute today if we had to buy > it from AT&T, which makes the breakup a good thing. Before the breakup only devices provided by `the phone company' could be connected to the PTN. Every month, year after year, you paid for that same phone. For an individual their rates for an answering machine were out of the question. Remember acoustic modems? 150, or the luxurious 300, baud. :) -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Jack O'Neill Systems Administrator / Systems Analyst jack@germanium.xtalwind.net Crystal Wind Communications, Inc. Finger jack@germanium.xtalwind.net for my PGP key. PGP Key fingerprint = F6 C4 E6 D4 2F 15 A7 67 FD 09 E9 3C 5F CC EB CD enriched, vcard, HTML messages > /dev/null -------------------------------------------------------------------------- A Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer is to computing what a McDonalds Certified Food Specialist is to fine cuisine. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message