sunil@ut-ngp.UUCP (Sunil Trivedi) (04/13/85)
> It would be just like AT&T to get mad at MCI and do something > stupid to retaliate. It was that kind of attitude on their part > towards companies like MCI that made the government break them > up in the first place. Considering how many AT&T sites there > are on the net, I would say that they need us more than we need > them. If they stop carrying the news for us, we could stop feeding > news to them! This incident is unlikely to cause anything that drastic. How you relate putting the MCI ad on net.general to the MCI-AT&T-US Gov't tango that led to the break-up is beyond me. At a time when the Feds were not being aggressive on monopolies (i.e. IBM and the oil mergers), AT&T "voluntarily" spun off the local Bell Operating Companies and sold its minority interest in Cincinati Bell and Southern New England Telephone along with giving up the Yellow Pages. MCI helped, but AT&T did not have to go along with the consent decree as its lawyers and stockholders could have help delay the case for many years more. > Now wasn't that childish? I can understand why some would be > upset by ads on the net, but I don't think that it should generate > such net-wide ill will. Let's face it: most sites on the net > are engaged in commercial endeavors. It's only natural for some > to view the net as a good advertising medium. Your higher-ups > might not like paying for the time, but his higher-ups probably > wouldn't pay for his reception costs unless they could get some > advertising value from the net. > Robert Perlberg > Resource Dynamics Inc. > New York > philabs!rdin!perl By the way, the original attacks on the ad did not come from the AT&T sites. I am surprized that you see no wrong in using a public forum to gain financially. Discussion of products include those not made "by AT&T" (in case you haven't noticed). I'm quite sure that most usenetters do not like to see such use (as you note from the "ill will"). I hope that you will not condone such actions in the future. Sunil Trivedi sunil@ut-ngp. {ARPA,UUCP} P.S. I'm not I die-hard red-white-'n-blue AT&Ter since I have used MCI,Sprint,Metrophone, and a local one called SATELCO, before returning to AT&T "Reach Out America/Reach Out California" and Sprint and MCI.