This book is a popular history of the dramatic struggles by one lawyer to represent basically broke small businessmen who wanted to take on AT&T and the Bell Telephone System in the United States, simply because the little guys wanted to compete against the AT&T telephone monopoly.
Bell had run one competitor, Tom Carter, out of business and almost closed the doors of another competitor, MCI. The author, Ray G. Besing, formerly a trial lawyer for a small Dallas law firm, spent over 29 years of his career in a seemingly unending battle against AT&T. The focus of his struggle was to force AT&T to allow competition in what had been the completely monopolized telephone industry. Besing's Carterfone v. AT&T case was the first dramatic victory, breaking AT&T's telephone equipment monopoly. Then, in a series of cases, Besing greatly aided MCI in opening AT&T's monopoly long distance services to competition. These battles led directly to the breakup of AT&T and the Bell System in 1984. Consequently, as competition in communications expanded in the 1980s and 1990s, this led to a new Information Age and a technological revolution that forever changed telecommunications, computers, the Internet and, indeed, the national and world economies far into the twenty-first century.