AT&T

AT&T (American Telephone and Telegraph) was the largest telecommunications company in the world for most of the twentieth century, and its history is inseparable from the history of networked infrastructure itself. Founded in 1885 as a subsidiary of the Bell Telephone Company, AT&T grew from a regional telephone service into a vertically integrated monopoly that controlled local service, long-distance service, telephone equipment manufacturing, and research through Bell Labs. By 1913, the Kingsbury Commitment had formalized AT&T's monopoly in exchange for regulated rates and universal service obligations — the foundational regulatory compact of American telecommunications.

AT&T's monopoly was not merely a market structure. It was a governance architecture. The company operated as a common carrier, legally obligated to connect any caller to any other caller on nondiscriminatory terms. This obligation was the price of its protected status: AT&T could not refuse service, prioritize traffic, or leverage its control of the network to exclude competitors. The architecture produced the most reliable and extensive communications network in history, but it also concentrated enormous power in a single actor — power that would eventually provoke one of the most significant antitrust actions in American history.

The Bell System and Vertical Integration

At its peak, the Bell System was not merely a telephone company. It was a comprehensive infrastructure monopoly that owned the wires, the switches, the telephones, and the research that produced the next generation of each. Customers could not buy a non-Bell telephone and connect it to the network. Independent equipment manufacturers were excluded. Long-distance competitors were denied interconnection. The network was technically superb and structurally closed.

This closure was defended on the grounds of technical integrity: non-Bell equipment might damage the network, the argument went, and only AT&T could guarantee quality of service. The Carterfone decision of 1968 demolished this rationale, establishing that the network operator could not control what equipment connected to its infrastructure. The Carterfone principle — that infrastructure must be open to compatible attachments — became the ancestral form of network neutrality, and it marked the beginning of the end for the integrated Bell System.

The Breakup: Modified Final Judgment

The 1982 Modified Final Judgment (MFJ) broke AT&T into eight pieces: a long-distance company retaining the AT&T name, and seven Regional Bell Operating Companies (the Baby