and that the pre-Reagan monopoly is restored to the extent possible. The split-up of the Bell system has rankled in my craw for almost 25 years.

Greg Shenaut

I'm all for putting old Ma Bell back together provided it get's rid of all the annoying tv ads for wireless and gets my phone bill back to something reasonable. I'm not talking about the price but the size. My home bill runs around $90 a month including DSL and runs around 5 pages long, 10 if you include front and back. My business bill is around $50 and is almost as long. Merge, drop the ads and get my bill to a page or two and I'm for it.

Don't see why one would want to further reduce competition in the US. It just makes it easy for foreign companies to come in and grab market share. If US carmakers had actually been more competitive, they wouldn't have been waltzed over by Toyota and Honda. Right now, T-Mobile is making big investments in AWS. With the expertise of the huge international TMO group backing it, it will take ATT's lunch if it thinks that it can simply gobble up all competition..

Greg, are you serious? Monopolies are usually not good for the consumer. Why would you want a monopoly?

(1) My memories of the Ma Bell years suggest to me that nothing was improved by breaking them up (except a lot of rich people got even richer--go figure), and a lot of things became more complicted and annoying.

(2) What is good for the consumer isn't necessarily good for the nation (think about it...).

(3) The comment was made in the context where the old monopoly has almost been re-established, which may or may not indicate that a single national telephone/et cetera system has a certain degree of "naturalness" to it.

Greg Shenaut

Greg, I agree that there are issues where a monopoly of some part of the process is unavoidably more efficient than anything even a healthy, regulated market can provide. Road and railway infrastructure come to mind, as do healthcare, education and wireline infrastructure. But wherever a monopoly is unavoidable, it needs to be run by the state, so that it can be kept fully transparent and accountable to the people. It also needs to be kept minimal.

In wireless communications, the state monopoly on the allocation of spectrum is regrettable, but necessary. But beyond that, there is no reason why there should be a monopoly. Yes, one does not want to have dozens of independent operators, but it seems not too inefficient to have 3 or 4 in each market.