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The monopoly Bell had made so much innovation possible - did society as a whole really benefit when Bell was broken up?

yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
Wasn't the antitrust stuff why Bell had to license out Unix like it did, thereby kickstarting the OS family that underpins most of our infrastructure?
- msla 6y ago
  Yes, it was. Bell was operating under a consent decree dating from 1956 which prohibited it from doing much beyond phones and telegrams. Bell didn't want to piss of the government, so it played it safe and declined to enter the software business when Unix was first developed, allowing it to spread on a more informal basis, including the source code. It did enter the software and Unix business when the consent decree expired, leading to System III and System V, which were closed-source. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/07/should-we-thank-for-feds-for-the-success-of-unix/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/07/should-we-thank-...
drewcoo 6y ago
Monopolies stamp out competition, resulting in less innovation. You might instead ask if society was better off before the invention of the teenager. That was emblematic of the shift toward short-term-profit-driven thinking we now call neoliberalism. That economic philosophy also happens to stifle innovation of the Bell Labs type by not financing long term projects. Today monopolies exist in spirit if not in technicality. Does society benefit? I'd say that looking back longingly at Bell Labs means no, it doesn't.
walrus01 6y ago
The modern commercial Internet and non-monopoly/non-government ISPs would not have become possible without the 1984 breakup. Companies like Sprint and MCI benefited greatly from it. All of the early core ISPs like UUNet and its competitors, in the pre 1997 period.
Aloha 6y ago
It's a very mixed bag. We lost lots of good paying jobs, we lost the rollout of ISDN, which would have spend up offering high speed network access, we lost hundreds of millions spent on basic research. We gained, a bunch of openness, mobility, and access to a wider breadth of services. It's still a mixed bag.
- xellisx 6y ago
  We had an ISDN at an office I worked at in 96, but we had cable internet (@Home) at the house. IIRC it was 6Mbps/1Mbps.
kitteh 6y ago
Yes. When I started at the phone company back in the day it was post breakup. The waste that went on when there was no competition was sickening. Many of my co-workers told me about all the abuse and theft that comes with being a monopoly - with the cost being passed down to the customer and the tax payer. Also the world of the Internet, the openness of IP protocols disrupted them. They finally had to deal with technology that wasn't dictated and controlled by them.
rmrfstar 6y ago
Large monopolists like Bell are basically non-governmental tax authorities. Tax-funded research can be effective, but it can also be horribly ineffective. It is worth observing that the quality of DoD acquisitions and public-funded R&D also declined around the time of Bell's most recent breakup. Might there be other forces at play than the dissolution of a single company?

Wasn't the antitrust stuff why Bell had to license out Unix like it did, thereby kickstarting the OS family that underpins most of our infrastructure?

msla 6y ago
Yes, it was. Bell was operating under a consent decree dating from 1956 which prohibited it from doing much beyond phones and telegrams. Bell didn't want to piss of the government, so it played it safe and declined to enter the software business when Unix was first developed, allowing it to spread on a more informal basis, including the source code. It did enter the software and Unix business when the consent decree expired, leading to System III and System V, which were closed-source. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/07/should-we-thank-for-feds-for-the-success-of-unix/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/07/should-we-thank-...

drewcoo 6y ago

Monopolies stamp out competition, resulting in less innovation. You might instead ask if society was better off before the invention of the teenager. That was emblematic of the shift toward short-term-profit-driven thinking we now call neoliberalism. That economic philosophy also happens to stifle innovation of the Bell Labs type by not financing long term projects. Today monopolies exist in spirit if not in technicality. Does society benefit? I'd say that looking back longingly at Bell Labs means no, it doesn't.

walrus01 6y ago

The modern commercial Internet and non-monopoly/non-government ISPs would not have become possible without the 1984 breakup. Companies like Sprint and MCI benefited greatly from it. All of the early core ISPs like UUNet and its competitors, in the pre 1997 period.

Aloha 6y ago

It's a very mixed bag. We lost lots of good paying jobs, we lost the rollout of ISDN, which would have spend up offering high speed network access, we lost hundreds of millions spent on basic research. We gained, a bunch of openness, mobility, and access to a wider breadth of services. It's still a mixed bag.

xellisx 6y ago
We had an ISDN at an office I worked at in 96, but we had cable internet (@Home) at the house. IIRC it was 6Mbps/1Mbps.

kitteh 6y ago

Yes. When I started at the phone company back in the day it was post breakup. The waste that went on when there was no competition was sickening. Many of my co-workers told me about all the abuse and theft that comes with being a monopoly - with the cost being passed down to the customer and the tax payer. Also the world of the Internet, the openness of IP protocols disrupted them. They finally had to deal with technology that wasn't dictated and controlled by them.

rmrfstar 6y ago

Large monopolists like Bell are basically non-governmental tax authorities. Tax-funded research can be effective, but it can also be horribly ineffective. It is worth observing that the quality of DoD acquisitions and public-funded R&D also declined around the time of Bell's most recent breakup. Might there be other forces at play than the dissolution of a single company?