worked, and was often propagandized, in a rather saccharine fashion.
Over the decades, people slowly grew tired of this. And then, openly
impatient with it. By the early 1980s, Ma Bell was to find herself
with scarcely a real friend in the world. Vail's industrial socialism
had become hopelessly out-of-fashion politically. Bell would be
punished for that. And that punishment would fall harshly upon the
people of the telephone community.

#

In 1983, Ma Bell was dismantled by federal court action. The pieces of
Bell are now separate corporate entities. The core of the company
became AT&T Communications, and also AT&T Industries (formerly Western
Electric, Bell's manufacturing arm). AT&T Bell Labs became Bell
Communications Research, Bellcore. Then there are the Regional Bell
Operating Companies, or RBOCs, pronounced "arbocks."

Bell was a titan and even these regional chunks are gigantic
enterprises: Fortune 50 companies with plenty of wealth and power
behind them. But the clean lines of "One Policy, One System, Universal
Service" have been shattered, apparently forever.

The "One Policy" of the early Reagan Administration was to shatter a
system that smacked of noncompetitive socialism. Since that time,
there has been no real telephone "policy" on the federal level.
Despite the breakup, the remnants of Bell have never been set free to
compete in the open marketplace.

The RBOCs are still very heavily regulated, but not from the top.
Instead, they struggle politically, economically and legally, in what
seems an endless turmoil, in a patchwork of overlapping federal and
state jurisdictions. Increasingly, like other major American
corporations, the RBOCs are becoming multinational, acquiring important
commercial interests in Europe, Latin America, and the Pacific Rim.
But this, too, adds to their legal and political predicament.

The people of what used to be Ma Bell are not happy about their fate.
They feel ill-used. They might have been grudgingly willing to make a
full transition to the free market; to become just companies amid other
companies. But this never happened. Instead, AT&T and the RBOCS ("the
Baby Bells") feel themselves wrenched from side to side by state
regulators, by Congress, by the FCC, and especially by the federal
court of Judge Harold Greene, the magistrate who ordered the Bell
breakup and who has been the de facto czar of American
telecommunications ever since 1983.

Bell p