Nigel Allen <ndallen@contact.uucp> (04/05/91)
Larry Lippman writes in telecom11.257.1: > It's not at all a bit of lore. While it is indeed true that > the Bell System maintained a wide diversity of non-WECo CO > apparatus in telephone companies which they had acquired, this > has little bearing upon the present discussion. I thought that the Bell System stopped taking over independent telephone companies in 1913 or so, pursuant to something called the Kingsbury Commitment, essentially a letter from an AT&T executive or lawyer named Kingsbury to the anti-trust officials of the U.S. Justice Department. Were there exceptions to this rule that allowed the Bell System to continue to acquire independent telcos, or am I just confused? In Canada, most small telephone companies were eventually swallowed up by Bell Canada or one of the other large telephone companies, so that several provinces only have a single telephone company. Nigel Allen ndallen@contact.uucp [Moderator's Note: There have been various court cases involving AT&T over the years, and there was one case (I forget the year) which said AT&T could not buy any more independent telcos except under certain strict conditions: if the independent telco was bankrupt or otherwise unable to provide service and about to suspend operations then AT&T *had* to take over ... nice fair arrangement, eh? About twenty years ago, the Chicago City Council was trying to talk IBT into purchasing the Chicago portion of Centel, a mostly suburban telco serving only a tiny slice of Chicago on the northwest side. IBT was inclined to do so, but the earlier court ruling forbade it. PAT]