[TUHS] V7 Addendem [ really lawyers and AT&T consent decree ]

[TUHS] V7 Addendem [ really lawyers and AT&T consent decree ]

[Noel Chiappa]

    > From: Clem Cole

    > IP and datagrams were very much built on no central control

Well, yes and no. One can easily have a centrally controlled datagram network
(q.v. the ARPANET) - although it's true that its path-selection algorithms,
etc were not centrally controlled - but other aspects of the network were.
(Interestingly, after various routing disasters the Internet caused by
improper configuration, some aspects of path selection in _parts_ of it are
now effectively centrally controlled; but I digress.)

The IP Internet was designed with no _overall_ central control, but as a
collection of autonomous entities.

    > In the end, it was MetCalfe's law (which was formulated on observations
    > about the phone system) that caused IP to win

Over any and all comers, including other decentralized datagram networks like
CLNP. MetCalfe's law doesn't talk about decentralized, it's just about 'first
to field'.


    > all want to see the net neutrality go away

This whole 'net neutrality' campaign drives me completely crazy.

If all people wanted was a rule saying 'ISPs can't give third parties _worse_
service, or - more importantly - deny service altogether, unless those parties
pay up' (i.e. what would amount to targeted extortion), I'd be _all for_ a
rule like that.

But the 'net neutrality' aficionados (most of whom, I'm fairly sure, are not
aware of/thinking about these details) are all signing up for a much more
expansive rule, one that says 'no ISP can offer anyone _better_ service for
paying more money' - which is quite different. My problems with this latter
form are two-fold.

First, what's wrong with that anyway? Do we have a rule saying you can't get
better road service if you pay? Absolutely not - restricted toll lanes are
becoming more and more common. So there's clearly no societal agreement on
this principle. (I suspect this 'net netrality' campaign has as a goal some
sort of 'forced equality' thing - unless the people behind it simply don't
even understand the difference.)

Second, that rule is, with a little extra work on the ISPs' part, ineffective
anyway. All they have to do is build _two_ networks, one better provisioned
than the other - and priced accordingly. You want better service? Sign up for
the second network; you'll pay more, but it's your choice.

    Noel

[TUHS] net neutrality

[Larry McVoy]

On Mon, Dec 11, 2017 at 02:23:28PM -0500, Noel Chiappa wrote:
> This whole 'net neutrality' campaign drives me completely crazy.
> 
> If all people wanted was a rule saying 'ISPs can't give third parties _worse_
> service, or - more importantly - deny service altogether, unless those parties
> pay up' (i.e. what would amount to targeted extortion), I'd be _all for_ a
> rule like that.
> 
> But the 'net neutrality' aficionados (most of whom, I'm fairly sure, are not
> aware of/thinking about these details) are all signing up for a much more
> expansive rule, one that says 'no ISP can offer anyone _better_ service for
> paying more money' - which is quite different. My problems with this latter
> form are two-fold.

So that's not at all the case.  Go look at the history, various ISPs like
Verizon, Comcast, etc, have done stuff like block bittorrent, skype, etc,
anything that they decided wasn't in their interest.

The problem is I paid for the bits.  Bits is bits.  I paid for a rate, 
that's what they got paid for, why should they get to charge a second
time for the same bits?  That's exactly what they want to do.  You 
pay them, you pay netflix, you've paid for the carrier, you've paid
for the content, oh, you want it to actually stream?  Too bad, Netflix
didn't pay their extortion so your movie watching sucks.

Don't believe me?  OK, how about this?

https://np.reddit.com/r/NeutralPolitics/comments/7i595b/will_the_repeal_of_net_neutrality_actually_help/dqwzn1g/

[TUHS] net neutrality

[Clem Cole]

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On Mon, Dec 11, 2017 at 2:36 PM, Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:

>
> The problem is I paid for the bits.  Bits is bits.  I paid for a rate,

​Amen brother...   they must be made a common carrier.  Just like a
shipping contain is 'said to contain' - they don't get to peek inside.
The bits are not theirs.   They have one and only one job -- delivery them.
Just like the electric company, needs to deliver electrons at some
rate/force.   They don't get to say I what I use them for.   The bits
coming in/going out are between me and the side I am communicating.

They are carriers i.e. plumbing --- which of course they do not like.   It
means its a lot hard for them to differentiate themselves other than in
service and price for delivery.   Period.

Clem​
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[TUHS] V7 Addendem [ really lawyers and AT&T consent decree ]

[Random832]

On Mon, Dec 11, 2017, at 14:23, Noel Chiappa wrote:
> If all people wanted was a rule saying 'ISPs can't give third parties
> _worse_ service, or - more importantly - deny service altogether,
> unless those parties pay up' (i.e. what would amount to targeted
> extortion), I'd be _all for_ a rule like that.
>
> But the 'net neutrality' aficionados (most of whom, I'm fairly sure,
> are not aware of/thinking about these details) are all signing up for
> a much more expansive rule, one that says 'no ISP can offer anyone
> _better_ service for paying more money' - which is quite different. My
> problems with this latter form are two-fold.

The rule that I want is that I am the customer. If Comcast wants to give
better service to my neighbor who is paying more, that's fine, but
that's not remotely the same thing as making it harder for me to connect
to Netflix than to their own streaming service because Netflix didn't
pay up. They're essentially taking money from me twice - once from
actually charging me for internet service, and once from the portion of
my Netflix (etc) subscription that goes to paying their extortion fees
(because let's not pretend that "fast lanes" won't go hand-in-hand with
degradation of the standard service). If they want more money from me
they should have to raise the actual price they bill me with instead of
being sneaky about it.

[TUHS] [ really net neutrality - don't you folks believe in subject lines? ]

[Jon Steinhart]

Random832 writes:
> The rule that I want is that I am the customer. If Comcast wants to give
> better service to my neighbor who is paying more, that's fine, but
> that's not remotely the same thing as making it harder for me to connect
> to Netflix than to their own streaming service because Netflix didn't
> pay up. They're essentially taking money from me twice - once from
> actually charging me for internet service, and once from the portion of
> my Netflix (etc) subscription that goes to paying their extortion fees
> (because let's not pretend that "fast lanes" won't go hand-in-hand with
> degradation of the standard service). If they want more money from me
> they should have to raise the actual price they bill me with instead of
> being sneaky about it.

To me this all comes down to the network stack model.  At the low level
I'd like to be paying X dollars for Y bits per second.  There shouldn't
be any restrictions on what I can do with those bits.  Netflix et. al.
should be doing the same.  Of course, they buy a lot more bits/second.

There's a big difference between the internet and the old phone system
which comes down to "peering agreements".  In the phone system, if an
AT&T customer called a GTE customer a connection would be made for that
call.  If an AT&T customer in an isolated district called another AT&T
customer it was AT&T's problem to route the call; it didn't go through
GTE's network.

Quick diversion here for a good story.  The town in which I went to
college was exactly one of these districts; we were New York Telephone
but separated from the rest of that network by a GTE district.  Dialing
1 in the pre-computer days said "hit the microwave tower 'cause it's
long distance".  We found a local number that had a 300-3300 Hz sweep
test tone.  We could dial 1 which would send the call out over the
microwave, then dial the local number.  There was no checking to see
that it could just be connected as a local call.  So the sweep tone
would start at 300 Hz and continue until it hit 2600 Hz at which point
the it would disconnect and leave the originator with an unallocated
trunk circuit just waiting for MF tones.  The great thing about it was
they NYT was looking for the 2600 Hz tone coming from our end but it
was coming from theirs.  They eventually caught on and installed a
notch filter.

Anyway, there is a real issue with the internet is that traffic can go
anywhere.  Netflix can be on provider A, I can be on provider A in some
other part of the world, and the traffic might get routed through provider
B who doesn't have anybody paying for either end of the connection.  If I
were a provider B customer then I'd at least be paying them something for
those bits.  Topology means that some providers route more traffic for
non-customers than customers.  It would be as if NYT sent all of its long
distance calls via GTE to another NYT customer; GTE wouldn't get paid for
the service.  It would seem that this might be addressed by having monthly
traffic settlements or something.

This is a different issue that end providers screwing their end users.  This
is more a matter of providers owning too much of the stack.  It's why I
support providers being common carriers of bits for all content providers.

There is a separate political issue here which is control of information.
It's obvious that the net is part of a huge propaganda machine now, and
that "bad folks" want to keep people from messing with them.  This is
similar to how ADM and Koch Industries getting seats on the NPR board
has eliminated any good reporting that they don't like.  Like a lot of
things today, sounds like news but isn't.  This is a non-technical issue
that probably doesn't belong on this list but is very very important.

Jon

[TUHS] V7 Addendem [ really lawyers and AT&T consent decree ]

[Jason Stevens]

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I pay for QOS from Asia to the USA. I’m super bottom tier, but it’s a heck of a lot better than ‘normal let the bits fly’ type service.  Some of those VPNs out there have private data centre backhauls which can actually make things smoother.  For a while I was looking at doing one through Azure or Amazon but it was far less hassle to just go to my telco and upgrade my internet to business class, and get onto a direct connection to a trans pacific connection to San Francisco vs a shared line that went through Japan.

Sent from Mail for Windows 10

From: Steve Johnson
Sent: Tuesday, 12 December 2017 8:28 AM
To: Clem Cole; Paul Winalski
Cc: TUHS main list
Subject: Re: [TUHS] V7 Addendem [ really lawyers and AT&T consent decree ]

I don't dispute anything you said, but I think there is another element.  It was simply an element of faith that to send voice you needed to have a guaranteed rate of speed.  Thus the interest in time-division multiplexing.  Deeply built into the Bell System mentality was the notion that you shouldn't offer service unless it is good service.  Thus the dial tone -- if the network was jammed, they didn't let you make a call.  But the ones that got through ran with no problems...

Recently I've been attempting to Skype on a group call with 5 people in Europe.  I would LOVE to have a guaranteed bandwidth for my call.  For "ordinary", non-time critical things, I'd be happy to fight for bits on an equal footing with everybody else.  Maybe the best solution is two networks...

Steve


----- Original Message -----
From:
"Clem Cole" <clemc at ccc.com>

To:
"Paul Winalski" <paul.winalski at gmail.com>
Cc:
"TUHS main list" <tuhs at minnie.tuhs.org>
Sent:
Mon, 11 Dec 2017 13:39:44 -0500
Subject:
Re: [TUHS] V7 Addendem [ really lawyers and AT&T consent decree ]



On Mon, Dec 11, 2017 at 1:17 PM, Paul Winalski <paul.winalski at gmail.com> wrote:
On 12/6/17, Jon Steinhart <jon at 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

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[TUHS] V7 Addendem [ really lawyers and AT&T consent decree ]

[Jason Stevens]

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It absolutely was too late.  By 1984 IBM had pushed out the AT, and although from there, we had PC stagnation until 1987, in those three years the rise of the IBM PC Clone was so insurmountable that IBM couldn’t push the PS/2 on anyone.  IBM had utterly lost momentum and the Compaq Deskpro 386 with Windows/386 had setup the world in which we live in today.

It’s crazy how seeming short that window was, and yet a company the size of IBM or AT&T couldn’t compete.

Sent from Mail for Windows 10

From: Clem Cole
Sent: Tuesday, 12 December 2017 2:41 AM
To: Paul Winalski
Cc: TUHS main list
Subject: Re: [TUHS] V7 Addendem [ really lawyers and AT&T consent decree ]



On Mon, Dec 11, 2017 at 1:17 PM, Paul Winalski <paul.winalski at gmail.com> wrote:
On 12/6/17, Jon Steinhart <jon at 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

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[TUHS] V7 Addendem [ really lawyers and AT&T consent decree ]

[Noel Chiappa]

    > From: George Michaelson

    > I didn't mean to disrespect the people who did the models or the
    > protocol or standards work btw.

Oh, I personally have no problem with you saying hard things about this work,
as long as it's what you really think. One never finds the truth unless one is
willing to look hard, neh? And I'm pretty sure Dave Clark (who was a leading
light in IntServ) would be OK with you doing so too (I worked very closely
with him for years, to the point where I deputized for him at meetings).

I honestly don't remember exactly what my take was on IntServ and RSVP; I'd
have to go look. I recollect seeing the case that _if resources were limited_,
certain classes of application (I guess we called them 'inelastic') would need
reservations to work properly. So I was probably susceptible to the argument
that 'if we've got bandwidth to light our <insert flammable objects> with, we
don't need resource reservation'. And I remember being not _thrilled_ with
RSVP, but I don't recall exactly why.

But, as, you said, wrong list. Maybe internet-history:

  http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history

if you did want to delve into it.

	Noel

[TUHS] V7 Addendem [ really lawyers and AT&T consent decree ]

[George Michaelson]

It lives on, in the QoS tagging gamers and VOIP people do on their
home routers, in a faint hope that apart from outbound queues, inbound
queues from their local provider do some kind of (re)prioritization
based on it.  Since thats the person who they pay money to, it kind-of
makes sense.

I didn't mean to disrespect the people who did the models or the
protocol or standards work btw. Like you, I think it was a solution in
search of a problem, in a point in time now past. What we have now, is
a horrid war on capital investment. Nobody wants to turn up the unlit
glass, because it would expose the pricing models which depend on
artificially constructed scarcity.

It interests me that a lot of stuff which doesn't work 'in the wide'
does work in specific contexts. So I would not be surprised if RSVP
and like things survive inside large corporate networks. In like
sense, aircraft databusses are often just normal switches with
isochronous TDM slot markers, to give them guaranteed/bounded delivery
behaviours. I think Christian Huitema did some stuff . on that in
Ethernet while he was in INRIA (or somebody in the same unit)

-G

On Tue, Dec 12, 2017 at 12:04 PM, Noel Chiappa <jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu> wrote:
>     > From: George Michaelson
>
>     > I don't think this list is the right place to conduct that particular
>     > debate.
>
> Not disagreeing; my message was a very short gloss on a very complicated
> situation, and I wasn't trying to push any particular position, just pointing
> out that work (whether the right direction, or not, I didn't opine) had been
> done.
>
>     > Its true RSVP didn't get traction, but the economics which underpin it
>     > are pretty bad, for the current Internet model of settlement
>
> Yes, but would _any_ resource reservation system, even one that _was_
> 'perfect', have caught on? Because:
>
>     > it would not surprise me if there is ... more dropped packets than
>     > strictly speaking the glass expects.
>
> This is related to something I didn't mention; if there is a lot more
> bandwidth (in the loose sense, not the exact original meaning) than demand,
> then resource reservation mechanisms buy you nothing, and are a lot of
> complexity.
>
> While there were bandwidth shortages in the 90s, later on they pretty much
> went away. So I think the perception (truth?) that there was a lot of headroom
> (and thus no need for resource reservation, to do applications like voice)
> played a really big role in the lack of interest (or so people argued at the
> time, in saying IntServ wasn't needed).
>
>        Noel

[TUHS] V7 Addendem [ really lawyers and AT&T consent decree ]

[Noel Chiappa]

    > From: George Michaelson

    > I don't think this list is the right place to conduct that particular
    > debate.

Not disagreeing; my message was a very short gloss on a very complicated
situation, and I wasn't trying to push any particular position, just pointing
out that work (whether the right direction, or not, I didn't opine) had been
done.

    > Its true RSVP didn't get traction, but the economics which underpin it
    > are pretty bad, for the current Internet model of settlement

Yes, but would _any_ resource reservation system, even one that _was_
'perfect', have caught on? Because:

    > it would not surprise me if there is ... more dropped packets than
    > strictly speaking the glass expects.

This is related to something I didn't mention; if there is a lot more
bandwidth (in the loose sense, not the exact original meaning) than demand,
then resource reservation mechanisms buy you nothing, and are a lot of
complexity.

While there were bandwidth shortages in the 90s, later on they pretty much
went away. So I think the perception (truth?) that there was a lot of headroom
(and thus no need for resource reservation, to do applications like voice)
played a really big role in the lack of interest (or so people argued at the
time, in saying IntServ wasn't needed).

       Noel

[TUHS] V7 Addendem [ really lawyers and AT&T consent decree ]

[George Michaelson]

I don't think this list is the right place to conduct that particular
debate. Its true RSVP didn't get traction, but the economics which
underpin it are pretty bad, for the current Internet model of
settlement and 'who pays, and when' -There was no point at which RSVP
was going to deploy into the inter-carrier settlement regime we have,
and have had for some time. It didn't actually mean buying 'more' of
anything, it simply meant pushing people who wouldn't buy more, into
smaller drop buckets.

I'd counter (sort of) with a comment that I heard at NANOG San Jose
from a US tier-1. There is more glass in the ground, than lit, by at
least one order of magnitude. If you have congestion on any US
domestic link, its not because you don't actually have clear channel,
its because somebody is making money from artificial scarcity.

I don't know for sure that the same is true trans-atlantic or
trans-pacific, but it would not surprise me if there is a lot of unlit
capacity, and more dropped packets than strictly speaking the glass
expects.

n-way conferencing is about as stressful as it gets for loss, and
delay. I think its a minor miracle I can do 3 or 4 way, heads and
voice at all. If I was paying, I'd expect better. Free QDU's are like
greshams law: bad (cheap) comms drives out good (paid) comms.

-G

On Tue, Dec 12, 2017 at 11:28 AM, Noel Chiappa <jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu> wrote:
>     > From: Steve Johnson
>
>     > Recently I've been attempting to Skype on a group call with 5 people in
>     > Europe. I would LOVE to have a guaranteed bandwidth for my call.
>
> The Internet engineering community did quite a bit of work on resource
> guarantees. (Google 'IntServ' and 'RSVP' - the latter is the control
> protocol.)
>
> Unfortunately, there was never much interest in it. People started doing
> voice with just plain 'best effort' service, and I guess it worked 'well
> enough' that nobody was interested in IntServ/RSVP.
>
>         Noel

[TUHS] V7 Addendem [ really lawyers and AT&T consent decree ]

[Noel Chiappa]

    > From: Steve Johnson

    > Recently I've been attempting to Skype on a group call with 5 people in
    > Europe. I would LOVE to have a guaranteed bandwidth for my call.

The Internet engineering community did quite a bit of work on resource
guarantees. (Google 'IntServ' and 'RSVP' - the latter is the control
protocol.)

Unfortunately, there was never much interest in it. People started doing
voice with just plain 'best effort' service, and I guess it worked 'well
enough' that nobody was interested in IntServ/RSVP.

	Noel

[TUHS] V7 Addendem [ really lawyers and AT&T consent decree ]

[Steve Johnson]

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I don't dispute anything you said, but I think there is another
element.  It was simply an element of faith that to send voice you
needed to have a guaranteed rate of speed.  Thus the interest in
time-division multiplexing.  Deeply built into the Bell System
mentality was the notion that you shouldn't offer service unless it is
good service.  Thus the dial tone -- if the network was jammed, they
didn't let you make a call.  But the ones that got through ran with
no problems...

Recently I've been attempting to Skype on a group call with 5 people
in Europe.  I would LOVE to have a guaranteed bandwidth for my
call.  For "ordinary", non-time critical things, I'd be happy to
fight for bits on an equal footing with everybody else.  Maybe the
best solution is two networks...

Steve

----- Original Message -----
From:
 "Clem Cole" <clemc at ccc.com>

To:
"Paul Winalski" <paul.winalski at gmail.com>
Cc:
"TUHS main list" <tuhs at minnie.tuhs.org>
Sent:
Mon, 11 Dec 2017 13:39:44 -0500
Subject:
Re: [TUHS] V7 Addendem [ really lawyers and AT&T consent decree ]

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

On 12/6/17, Jon Steinhart <jon at fourwinds.com [2]> 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

 

Links:
------
[1] mailto:paul.winalski at gmail.com
[2] mailto:jon at fourwinds.com

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[TUHS] V7 Addendem [ really lawyers and AT&T consent decree ]

[Arthur Krewat]

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On 12/11/2017 3:11 PM, William Cheswick wrote:
> While I am no fan of how AT&T ran its business, and the diminution of 
> Bell Labs is
> a capital crime to humanity, it must be noted that AT&T was competing 
> with MCI, who
> was cooking the books. “How can they offer phone calls for 
> $0.01/minute?”  The answer:
> they couldn’t, but did anyway.
>
As I recall, MCI was also passing calls into Canada, routing them back 
to the US and avoiding all sorts of fees. They were doing it to the US 
Govt, I'm not sure if they did that to regular people.

art .k

[TUHS] V7 Addendem [ really lawyers and AT&T consent decree ]

[William Cheswick]

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While I am no fan of how AT&T ran its business, and the diminution of Bell Labs is
a capital crime to humanity, it must be noted that AT&T was competing with MCI, who
was cooking the books. “How can they offer phone calls for $0.01/minute?”  The answer:
they couldn’t, but did anyway.

BTW, there are still good people doing good work at Bell Labs.  But it certainly isn’t
what it used to be.

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

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[TUHS] V7 Addendem [ really lawyers and AT&T consent decree ]

[Clem Cole]

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

> On 12/6/17, Jon Steinhart <jon at 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
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[TUHS] V7 Addendem [ really lawyers and AT&T consent decree ]

[Paul Winalski]

On 12/6/17, Jon Steinhart <jon at 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.

-Paul W.

[TUHS] V7 Addendem [ really lawyers and AT&T consent decree ]

[William Corcoran]

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Oh, yes!  I remember the copper T1’s eventually traveled over a single pair using ADSL at high voltage.  In our metropolitan area, the copper plant had loading coils everywhere—undocumented.  If your copper T1 had the misfortune of having a loading coil somewhere in its path then your circuit was doomed.   Plus, these little Pairgain’s would literally explode inside the manholes.  Copper and T1s should have been outlawed.  Especially, since using fiber for everything but the last foot (TLF, lol) was far more reliable.

I do hope that the archivists view the delivery mechanisms like the T1, POTS, and so on as having historical significance and are inextricably linked to UNIX.  Talking to anyone that worked on the Bell System (and later telcos) always reveal great stories. Many are worthy of preservation.

Incidentally, I had a similar issue with a staffer needing remote access.  There were no viable wired solutions.  However, surprisingly, 4G MIFI with an unlimited data plan actually was a stable solution—-and she even received a dedicated IP.


Bill Corcoran


On Dec 7, 2017, at 9:04 AM, Ron Natalie <ron at ronnatalie.com<mailto:ron at ronnatalie.com>> wrote:

T1 wasn't cheap nor ubiquitous.    I ran the networking for the degree granting public colleges in NJ (which on the whole is a fairly metropolitan area) but there were places we couldn't get it.
It was also expensive.   Old school copper T1 required repeaters every quarter mile or so.     Debugging could be fun.   At least our telco (NJ Bell) back then could move the loop back around while I did tests to tell them where the line was failing.

And yeah, I live in one of those backwaters now.   No cable, no fiber optic anything.    I use two DSL lines to get an aggregate 20M down 1.5M up.   That's the best the vesiges of the old GTE telco down here can do.
ATT has fiber in communities down the road but we're too sparse to attract their interest.    Comcast won't even pull in a local drop from the main road.



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[TUHS] V7 Addendem [ really lawyers and AT&T consent decree ]

[Larry McVoy]

On Wed, Dec 06, 2017 at 09:08:20PM -0800, Jon Steinhart wrote:
> And lucky you.  I pay $450/month for a T1 which is the best that I can get where
> I live because there is no universal service.

For you folks with crappy net connections, first I have felt your pain,
my condolences.  I live in the Santa Cruz mountains in a rural area even
for the mountains.  So no cable, no reliable DSL.

But what we do have is line of sight to a tower on Loma Prieta.  I worked
a deal with Etheric where I get 8Mbit down and up guaranteed and they let
it burst to available space on the radio.  I average about 20 down/up, it
sometimes goes lower but that's the average.  Just tried now and 25 down/up.
I worked a 5 year prepaid deal with them and got them down to $130/month.

It's point to point wifi and works really well.  See if you can get some
of that.
-- 
---
Larry McVoy            	     lm at mcvoy.com             http://www.mcvoy.com/lm 

[TUHS] V7 Addendem [ really lawyers and AT&T consent decree ]

[Ron Natalie]

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Ø  For AT&T (which no longer is a company since the current AT&T is really AT&T in name only.
SBC Communications bought AT&T Corp. on November 18, 2005, and changed its name to AT&T Inc. (The real AT&T 
is no longer...)



 

Well SBC was one of the RBOCs so while it wasn’t the post-Greene ATT, it is a decent chunk of the original monopoly.   Not only the old BellSouth but also Illinois, Inndiana, Michigan, Ohio, Pacific, Southwestern and Pacific Bells.    They did acquire the old long lines AT&T and wireless sytem.    Of course AT&T and already spun out what we would have called Western Electric in the days (and hence the UNIX heritage).

 

 

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[TUHS] V7 Addendem [ really lawyers and AT&T consent decree ]

[Ron Natalie]

T1 wasn't cheap nor ubiquitous.    I ran the networking for the degree granting public colleges in NJ (which on the whole is a fairly metropolitan area) but there were places we couldn't get it.
It was also expensive.   Old school copper T1 required repeaters every quarter mile or so.     Debugging could be fun.   At least our telco (NJ Bell) back then could move the loop back around while I did tests to tell them where the line was failing.

And yeah, I live in one of those backwaters now.   No cable, no fiber optic anything.    I use two DSL lines to get an aggregate 20M down 1.5M up.   That's the best the vesiges of the old GTE telco down here can do.
ATT has fiber in communities down the road but we're too sparse to attract their interest.    Comcast won't even pull in a local drop from the main road.

[TUHS] V7 Addendem [ really lawyers and AT&T consent decree ]

[Jon Steinhart]

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William Corcoran writes:
> Well,  sure in 1963 the T1 carrier was a huge pipe.  It was a huge pipe in
> 1970.   It was also a huge pipe in 1980 for business.   (Not so for the telcos,
> as ATT had Metrobus in the 80’s and the telcos had SONET in the
> 90’s—-completely inaccessible but to the largest corporations)
> 
> However, today, I have Fios with nearly 1 Gigabit up and down for a small fee.
>  
> 
> Thank you Judge Greene!
> 
> (Let’s not forget, I now have access to a working v7 for free where the license
> previously cost $28,000.) 
> 
> 
> Bill Corcoran

Well yes, the consent degree made that possible.  But remember that a whole pile
of the technology came from BTL and that sort of stuff isn't getting done at the
same level without research funding.

And lucky you.  I pay $450/month for a T1 which is the best that I can get where
I live because there is no universal service.

[TUHS] V7 Addendem [ really lawyers and AT&T consent decree ]

[George Michaelson]

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The capital investment regime changed. AT&T like all the other telcos
used utility scale funding options, to buy asset with a 50+ year life
and then reaped the benefits against the long tail of payment on the
investment funding to make it.

Fast forward to the 1970s and people decided they'd rather sweat an
asset fast, make a huge Return on Investment, and let dumb schmucks
from their parents generation dig holes to earn low interest income
for 50 years. Who wants to live forever! Cocaine on aisle three, Junk
bond finance, speculation, deregulation... Pretty much everything
we're using right now, right down the food chain comes from that
decision. My laptop is in a three year depreciation cycle. My ISP is
desperately trying not to have to spend money every 5-10 years
re-engineering the switching and routing logic behind my
fibre-to-the-home. The glass in the ground will last 50 years, but the
government expects funding to complete its capital cost debt return
inside 5. (insane)

Admittedly, given the rate of change in technology, I think there was
some coupling. If you had just invested in a strowger exchange and
somebody showed you a transistor, if you were smart your heart was
sinking: Kid was in meccano, not in mechanical switching any more...

On Thu, Dec 7, 2017 at 6:30 AM, Kurt H Maier <khm at sciops.net> wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 06, 2017 at 07:23:00PM +0000, William Corcoran wrote:
>> Well,  sure in 1963 the T1 carrier was a huge pipe.  It was a huge pipe in 1970.   It was also a huge pipe in 1980 for business.   (Not so for the telcos, as ATT had Metrobus in the 80’s and the telcos had SONET in the 90’s—-completely inaccessible but to the largest corporations)
>>
>> However, today, I have Fios with nearly 1 Gigabit up and down for a small fee.
>>
>> Thank you Judge Greene!
>>
>> (Let’s not forget, I now have access to a working v7 for free where the license previously cost $28,000.)
>
> But that was the flip side of being allowed to maintain a monopoly --
> you could get phone service damn near anywhere, while getting FiOS
> service is possible only in geographic regions small enough to be a
> rounding error compared to POTS penetration.  Near-universal service was
> the burden AT&T was required to bear.  Now, nobody is bearing it.
>
> The current state of bandwidth is great if you're in the right place at
> the right time.  For everyone else in the US nothing is getting better.
> Even 100mbit service is unavailable to the majority of the nation, let
> alone laughably bizarre requests like "reliability."
>
> khm

[TUHS] V7 Addendem [ really lawyers and AT&T consent decree ]

[Kurt H Maier]

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On Wed, Dec 06, 2017 at 07:23:00PM +0000, William Corcoran wrote:
> Well,  sure in 1963 the T1 carrier was a huge pipe.  It was a huge pipe in 1970.   It was also a huge pipe in 1980 for business.   (Not so for the telcos, as ATT had Metrobus in the 80’s and the telcos had SONET in the 90’s—-completely inaccessible but to the largest corporations)
> 
> However, today, I have Fios with nearly 1 Gigabit up and down for a small fee.
> 
> Thank you Judge Greene!
> 
> (Let’s not forget, I now have access to a working v7 for free where the license previously cost $28,000.)

But that was the flip side of being allowed to maintain a monopoly --
you could get phone service damn near anywhere, while getting FiOS
service is possible only in geographic regions small enough to be a
rounding error compared to POTS penetration.  Near-universal service was
the burden AT&T was required to bear.  Now, nobody is bearing it. 

The current state of bandwidth is great if you're in the right place at
the right time.  For everyone else in the US nothing is getting better.
Even 100mbit service is unavailable to the majority of the nation, let
alone laughably bizarre requests like "reliability."

khm

[TUHS] V7 Addendem [ really lawyers and AT&T consent decree ]

[William Corcoran]

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Well,  sure in 1963 the T1 carrier was a huge pipe.  It was a huge pipe in 1970.   It was also a huge pipe in 1980 for business.   (Not so for the telcos, as ATT had Metrobus in the 80’s and the telcos had SONET in the 90’s—-completely inaccessible but to the largest corporations)

However, today, I have Fios with nearly 1 Gigabit up and down for a small fee.

Thank you Judge Greene!

(Let’s not forget, I now have access to a working v7 for free where the license previously cost $28,000.)


Bill Corcoran


On Dec 6, 2017, at 1:49 PM, Jon Steinhart <jon at fourwinds.com<mailto:jon at fourwinds.com>> wrote:

Clem Cole writes:
On Wed, Dec 6, 2017 at 11:15 AM, Jon Steinhart <jon at fourwinds.com<mailto:jon at fourwinds.com>> wrote:
  Can't answer your question directly, but I think that some of this was
  the result of the prior consent decree banning them from being in the
  data business.  I seem to recall that it was technically illegal for
  them to sell SW and don't know how giving it away would have been viewed.

I really think Jon is correct here.  The behavior was all left over from the
1956 consent decree, which settled the 1949 anti-trust case against AT&T.

As the recipients of the AT&T IP, we used to refer the behavior as "UNIX was
abandoned on your doorstep."  Throughout the 60s and 70s, the AT&T sr
management from the CEO on down, were terrified of another anti-trust case.
And of course they got one and we all know what judge Green did to resolve that
in 1980.

I described the activities/actions in detail in my paper: "UNIX: A View from
the Field as We Played the Game" which I gave last fall in Paris.  The
proceeding are supposed to go on line at some point.  Send me email if you want
the details and I'll send you a PDF.   I'm holding off cutting and pasting here
for reasons of brevity.  For an legal analysis I also recommend: “AT&T
Divestiture & the Telecommunications Market”, John Pinheiro, Berkeley Technical
Law Journal, 303, September 1987, Volume 2, Issue 2, Article 5 which I cite in
my paper.

Clem

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.

Some of us remember the days in which phones were reliable and you could
understand the person on the other end.  Or when your phone lasted 60+
years.  Or the current debate about whether it's ok to eliminate exchange
powered phones that work in an emergency.

During the primaries when Ted Cruz would stand up and hold a dial phone
and say "this is what government regulation got you" I always thought
"Yeah, give me more of that.  It's 60 years old, still works better than
what you can get today, and if you hurl it across the room it'll still
work which is more than you can say for anything made post-split."

Not to mention it ended one of the best research labs in history.

Jon
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[TUHS] V7 Addendem [ really lawyers and AT&T consent decree ]

[William Pechter]

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Clem Cole wrote:
>
>
> On Wed, Dec 6, 2017 at 1:49 PM, Jon Steinhart <jon at fourwinds.com
> <mailto:jon at 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.
>
For AT&T (which no longer is a company since the current AT&T is really
AT&T in name only.
SBC Communications bought AT&T Corp. on November 18, 2005, and changed
its name to AT&T Inc. (The real AT&T
is no longer...)

>     Some of us remember the days in which phones were reliable and you
>     could
>     understand the person on the other end.  Or when your phone lasted 60+
>     years.  Or the current debate about whether it's ok to eliminate
>     exchange
>     powered phones that work in an emergency.
>
>     During the primaries when Ted Cruz would stand up and hold a dial
>     phone
>     and say "this is what government regulation got you" I always thought
>     "Yeah, give me more of that.  It's 60 years old, still works
>     better than
>     what you can get today, and if you hurl it across the room it'll still
>     work which is more than you can say for anything made post-split."
>
>     Not to mention it ended one of the best research labs in history.
>
> ​Amen brother Jon....​
>  
>
And it also helped cause the end of a number of computer companies,
including NCR, DEC, Pyramid Technologies...

The bad decisions AT&T made once they got into the computer hardware
business were legendary.

They had product support problems (replaced a significant quantity of
6300 motherboards on their PC for an MS-DOS clock problem they
introduced by clearing the seconds in the RTC chip at each boot)... They
had issues with their Field Service techs being unwilling to work on
Pyramid OS/x boxes under Unix (AT&T System 7000) because that was system
software and they were only willing to work with a (nonexistant on
Pyramid) offline diagnostics set. 

An AT&T Union tech walkout from Pyramid classes was averted on that
one...  They were not too successful selling Alliant FX/1 and FX/8 boxes
as AT&T machines as well.  I worked for both computer companies in
service and training and saw this first hand.AT&T was to hand AT&T
Business cards to Alliant Service personnel to handle the customers.

They tried to sell the 3b20 simplex box against the Vax into scientific
markets only to find that although the integer performance was
superior... Scientific use really needs hardware floating point.  The
later 3b line got much better but the first entry was frightenening

Unfortunately, half of Pyramid's sales were through OEM's
(Siemens-Nixdorf and AQT&T mostly) so the ton of business dropped
immediately once the NCR deal took hold.  It happened just as Pyramid
moved to DCOS/x  (Their SVR4 port to MIPS).  This killed a ton of growth
and the deal to move the US Internal Revenue from System III based Zilog
Zeus boxes to Pyramid...

Sometimes you can't always get what you want.  Sometimes when you get it
you screw yourself into the ground.

AT&T, I was told, couldn't figure out how MCI could undercut them in
long distance.  The experts said -- we have the network in place and
paid for and there's no way we could do it for under 10c per minute...
They didn't figure MCI (later LDDS) could cook the books to make the
numbers look better.

Back in '84 DEC was to train me as a Unix admin and act as the outsource
contractor supplier to AT&T.  This would've had one source of service
and support for all their Vaxes and eliminated the large collection of
Sysadmin and Operator suppliers.  Pre-IBM Global Services type stuff.  
The wife was at the Labs at the time and they supposedly announced it. 
Rumor says a DEC and AT&T merger about the same time fell apart. 
Perhaps the history is buried in the DEC Archives now in the Computer
Museuum.  I was told I was in on the deal in Oct/Nov 1983 or
84 and it fell apart the next January or so.

Bill





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[TUHS] V7 Addendem [ really lawyers and AT&T consent decree ]

[Jon Steinhart]

Warner Losh writes:
> On Wed, Dec 6, 2017 at 11:49 AM, Jon Steinhart <jon at fourwinds.com> wrote:
> >
> > During the primaries when Ted Cruz would stand up and hold a dial phone
> > and say "this is what government regulation got you" I always thought
> > "Yeah, give me more of that.  It's 60 years old, still works better than
> > what you can get today, and if you hurl it across the room it'll still
> > work which is more than you can say for anything made post-split."
> >
> 
> We traded reliability for cat videos and any kind of porn you'd ever want
> (and sever you wouldn't!)
> 
> Warner

Exactly.  I remember Dick Hause (?) doing a nice graphical demo on the Glance
G that showed how the phone system routed around faults and was able to because
of the "there shall be a minimum of three paths out of any exchange" rule.  A
while back my long distance went out because someone hit a phone pole 40 miles
away.  Couldn't even call to report it because support was in Seattle and there
was no path there from here; that was the only route.

Something to keep in mind with the internet.  While TCP/IP is great for routing
around trouble it can only do so when there are alternate routes.  Seem to be
fewer and fewer of these.

Jon

[TUHS] V7 Addendem [ really lawyers and AT&T consent decree ]

[Clem Cole]

[-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --]
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1308 bytes --]

On Wed, Dec 6, 2017 at 1:49 PM, Jon Steinhart <jon at 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.
>
> Some of us remember the days in which phones were reliable and you could
> understand the person on the other end.  Or when your phone lasted 60+
> years.  Or the current debate about whether it's ok to eliminate exchange
> powered phones that work in an emergency.
>
> During the primaries when Ted Cruz would stand up and hold a dial phone
> and say "this is what government regulation got you" I always thought
> "Yeah, give me more of that.  It's 60 years old, still works better than
> what you can get today, and if you hurl it across the room it'll still
> work which is more than you can say for anything made post-split."
>
> Not to mention it ended one of the best research labs in history.

​Amen brother Jon....​
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[TUHS] V7 Addendem [ really lawyers and AT&T consent decree ]

[Warner Losh]

On Wed, Dec 6, 2017 at 11:49 AM, Jon Steinhart <jon at fourwinds.com> wrote:
>
> During the primaries when Ted Cruz would stand up and hold a dial phone
> and say "this is what government regulation got you" I always thought
> "Yeah, give me more of that.  It's 60 years old, still works better than
> what you can get today, and if you hurl it across the room it'll still
> work which is more than you can say for anything made post-split."
>

We traded reliability for cat videos and any kind of porn you'd ever want
(and sever you wouldn't!)

Warner
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[TUHS] V7 Addendem [ really lawyers and AT&T consent decree ]

[Jon Steinhart]

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Clem Cole writes:
> On Wed, Dec 6, 2017 at 11:15 AM, Jon Steinhart <jon at fourwinds.com> wrote:
> >    Can't answer your question directly, but I think that some of this was
> >    the result of the prior consent decree banning them from being in the
> >    data business.  I seem to recall that it was technically illegal for
> >    them to sell SW and don't know how giving it away would have been viewed.
> 
> I really think Jon is correct here.  The behavior was all left over from the
> 1956 consent decree, which settled the 1949 anti-trust case against AT&T.
> 
> As the recipients of the AT&T IP, we used to refer the behavior as "UNIX was
> abandoned on your doorstep."  Throughout the 60s and 70s, the AT&T sr
> management from the CEO on down, were terrified of another anti-trust case. 
> And of course they got one and we all know what judge Green did to resolve that
> in 1980.
> 
> I described the activities/actions in detail in my paper: "UNIX: A View from
> the Field as We Played the Game" which I gave last fall in Paris.  The
> proceeding are supposed to go on line at some point.  Send me email if you want
> the details and I'll send you a PDF.   I'm holding off cutting and pasting here
> for reasons of brevity.  For an legal analysis I also recommend: “AT&T
> Divestiture & the Telecommunications Market”, John Pinheiro, Berkeley Technical
> Law Journal, 303, September 1987, Volume 2, Issue 2, Article 5 which I cite in
> my paper.
> 
> Clem

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.

Some of us remember the days in which phones were reliable and you could
understand the person on the other end.  Or when your phone lasted 60+
years.  Or the current debate about whether it's ok to eliminate exchange
powered phones that work in an emergency.

During the primaries when Ted Cruz would stand up and hold a dial phone
and say "this is what government regulation got you" I always thought
"Yeah, give me more of that.  It's 60 years old, still works better than
what you can get today, and if you hurl it across the room it'll still
work which is more than you can say for anything made post-split."

Not to mention it ended one of the best research labs in history.

Jon