It was an issue because licensing their logo was not a telecommunications use. Some more background on the consent decree, first one needs to understand what s

It was an issue because licensing their logo was not a telecommunications use. Some more background on the consent decree, first one needs to understand what state of the art was in 1956 - * No Digital anything, PCM was on the drawing boards, but not in production. * Analog FDMA carrier, either over open wire, coax or microwave. * DDD (Direct Distance Dialing) had just been introduced to large cities, but was still not universally available, even in places with dial service. * Significant amounts of open wire carrier in large swaths of the country, the coming microwave and coax networks were still under construction. * No transistors capable of much over 1 MHz * Electromechanical Switching, however remreed and transistorized stored program switching was on the drawing boards. * No Touch Tone dialing, all dial service is rotary, however significant parts of the country still have manual only service. The big fear was Bell getting into computing or any other kinds of high technology - simply because of their steady revenue from the BOC's - they could sustain a loss on a new line of business for many years while they developed the technology. To give further background, AT&T developed roughly half of the foundational technologies that powers our world today.