Seth Gainer

“But what is the choice? The choice is keep the Bell System as an integrated enterprise with regulations that will strain it, or satisfy the national consensus, which says that in order for the Bell System to be free, it must be much smaller. And that was the decision that was made . . . I told Your Honor last January that this case raised a truly fundamental issue. It is a broad, profound, philosophical, almost legal issue. What is the relationship between a public utility and the antitrust laws? How do you put those two things together? What are the obligations? And Your Honor has expressed it yourself: ‘Hey, you are just a big corporation, go out and make money, quit pretending that you are really concerned with the public interest.’ That tone. You know, the company . . . It may be hard for a lot of people to believe it, but for a hundred years this company has been based on the notion of public service. A lot of Bell System people cried this morning, and not because they are not going to make any more money . . . We can live with this as a money-making institution. The problem is, what does it do to the public? What does it do to the concept of universal service? And the message that has been coming out from Congress, and from this court, is, ‘That is none of your business. The market protects the public interest. You are being arrogant in thinking you even have a responsibility to consider it.”
― Steve Coll, The Deal of the Century: The Breakup of AT&T

“Mr. Connell says, quoting a sage, ‘Regulation means you never have to say you’re sorry.’ In fact, regulation means that you always have to say you are sorry, because what we are dealing with in this case is a situation in which, starting with that decision in 1968 [Carterfone], the commission has evolved a set of rules that have changed on a year-to-year basis. I don’t read Mr. Segal, but Voltaire in describing a trip across France once said, ‘In crossing France, laws changes about as often as you change horses.’ And in crossing the decade from 1968 to 1978, regulations — which, to this company, that’s laws, that is what we have to follow — changed more often that we were able to find horses, or elephants, and we were constantly being told by the regulators not only that they were going to change the rules but that we should have known it to start with.”
― Steve Coll, The Deal of the Century: The Breakup of AT&T

“Ma Bell is a symbol of the past. No longer is a steady dividend sufficient. Today’s investor looks to the prospect of improvement. Today’s employees reject maternalism; they’ll take care of themselves. Today ours is a business that knows that it is not we, AT&T, but the customer who knows best. Mother Bell simply doesn’t live here anymore.”
― Steve Coll, The Deal of the Century: The Breakup of AT&T

“DeButts did not shy away from this challenge, but he nonetheless felt ambivalent about it. “The service motivation has been bred in the bones of telephone people over the course of a hundred years,” he said in one speech. “To supplant that motivation with a market motivation might make us a no less profitable business and a no less effective one, though by different standards. But we would be a different business surely, and I for one cannot help but feel that we would be the poorer for it, and so would the public we serve.”
― Steve Coll