Who Broke Up AT&T?: From Ma Bell to the Internet

Many members of the public have wanted to understand what happened to the telephone business and why all the confusion over the past 15 years. It has been a very frustrating and confusing time for millions of telephone subscribers and, now, the users of PCs and the Internet.

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.