For whom Ma Bell tolls

“The rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated.” Ma Bell

Once upon a time the telephone system in America was a monopoly, intended as such to facilitate efficient telecommunications. It worked: we had the best phone service anywhere in the world … until we decided to fix it.

Upset because only AT&T was allowed to make phone equipment, a few sore loser gadgeteers sued the monopoly forcing the government to break the phone company into Baby Bells (including PacBell, quickly nicknamed “Tinker Bell” by the telecommunicati). Now equipment manufacturers were free to compete. And the situation would have stayed that way if it weren’t for two factors.

First Factor: Judge Green’s anti-trust judgment directed AT&T to lease their long-distance lines to all interested parties on equal terms. A group of enterprising young firms with names like MCI and Sprint were first in line for the lines. These upstarts turned around and retailed long distance service over those lines at a reasonable markup, which, as I recall, was initially 8 billion percent under what AT&T charged.

Second Factor: Cellular telephony happened. (Don’t you love the word telephony? It rolls off your tongue like butter off a tall stack of Aunt Jemimas). Cell phones don’t even need the damn long lines and that sank the parties of the First Factor.

Here we are, 20 years later: The dial numbers are too small and cell phones give me the feeling I’m talking over sandpaper. I don’t know where they shot the commercial “Can you hear me now?” but it wasn’t near my house. And, take my phone bill … please. It’s so long that AT&T, alias SBC, alias PacBell, alias AT&T offered to bind it in a nice leather cover for a fee of $35.29.

Does the word “fee” ring a Bell? My last phone bill had 10 different fees — 25 percent of the total. These fees are also called tariffs and taxes, like “CA High Cost Fund Surcharge-B." (Apparently “Surcharge-A” wasn’t large enough. That doesn’t mean they replaced it; I’m paying for “A” as well.) Then there are “pass-on charges” where each entity — phone company, long-distance carrier, county, state, federal and local bridge club — charge you a fee and then pass it on to the next entity who charge you again.

Eventually (by which I mean right afterthe next billing cycle) phone service will be free if you accept the fees. That’s where telecoms make the real money. The cost of a tariff to AT&T is $.00; the cost of a phone fee is $.00 plus nothing. But you already know this if you’ve opted for any phone services recently.

Recently the government adopted a new monopoly policy position vis-à-vis AT&T, which is “never mind>" The newly resurrected AT&T promises a range of new services. For example, after x rings, a voice announces that the other party is not home but AT&T can leave a message or continue calling for a fee of $.95. Additional services might be: "I can tell you whether the other party is lying” for a fee of $1.75 per minute, or, when the other person puts you on hold to take an incoming call, "I can tell you who your party thinks is more important than you” for a fee of $25.

Ironically, market forces are putting back together what the Justice Department broke up in 1984. AT&T is the latest winner in the telegentia’s game of Can-You-Top-This. In January 2005, SBC bought the old AT&T for $16 billion, took the AT&T name and then gobbled down BellSouth for $89 billion and Tinker Bell for something like a buck and a half plus stadium-name rights, proving you can put Humpty-Dumpty back together again. Meanwhile, when no one was looking, Sprint and Nextel got hitched and Verizon ate MCI for $8.45 billion. Not to be outdone, Benny Cosmiki, my local neighborhood bully, solidified his control over all the tin-can-with-a-string telephony devices on my old block.

AT&T will be required to charge all websites the same price for its high-speed pipes, leading me to paraphrase Yogi Berra: “Ma Bell is déjà vu all over again.”I'm looking forward to a new rash of Lily Tomlin ads.

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