Seth Gainer

“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

“But I couldn’t help think, when I heard Mr. Connell talking, about the time I wrote a political platform for a political candidate, who can remain nameless. It wasn’t long, after we got through with the platform in that negotiation, when someone said, ‘That’s a fine platform.’ I said, and I meant it, ‘Yes, it touches on every subject that is important to the people of this state, and it avoids every issue.”
― Steve Coll, The Deal of the Century: The Breakup of AT&T

“Who can AT&T deal with to get a way out of this quagmire?” The executive wrote. “One person proposes a coherent antitrust theory, can make a deal and have it stick: Baxter. The omnibus ‘break it all up’ approach of Justice has gradually been replaced by a workable scheme, the dimensions of which offer AT&T a valuable commodity 00 reasonable certainty in the future. The shareholders can be protected, the Bell companies can survive it, and so can AT&T. Significantly, the court has now become by far the best option for a final resolution of issues that simply can’t wait any longer. Brown sees this as the best of a series of hard alternatives — one of the worst being to do nothing but continue to slug it out on all fronts. The Bell organization says we’ll do it and we’ll make it work and we’ll leave the philosophizing till later. Besides which, we’re not wimps. We want to compete and we want to demonstrate that we can. Offense is more fun than defense. This is a workable solution. Let’s take the initiative and put the destiny of the business back in the hands of management.”
― Steve Coll, The Deal of the Century: The Breakup of AT&T

“As in war, the only clear winners during the first months after divestiture were those who possessed the means to turn carnage into profit.”
― Steve Coll, The Deal of the Century: The Breakup of AT&T