Cory Doctorow

Because this is a really important point.

It's just because... Well, they made new pixels where pixels didn't exist before by making an inference.

So there's a long history of saying that we should subsidize and protect large American firms to defend America against foreign firms.

So for many, many years, the argument against breaking up AT&T was that they were our national champion and that they were keeping us safe from foreign aggressors.

In the mid-1950s, AT&T was almost broken up.

The DOD intervened to say that if we lost AT&T, if it wasn't intact, America might lose the Korean War.

So...

AT&T won the Korean War, because they got another 30 years, right?

The only people, arguably, who won the Korean War were AT&T, including both sides in the Korean War.

Somebody did.

When the 80s rolled around,

There was this law in the 70s and the 80s rolled around and we were once again thinking about breaking up AT&T.

There was this long argument about how there was this belligerent foreign power in the Pacific Rim that they weren't original, they stole our IP and cloned our technology and they would destroy our high-tech industries if we did not have a giant company to defend us against them.

That country was Japan.

Now, it turns out that the major project of AT&T was not defending America from Japan, it was preventing Americans from getting modems.

Because AT&T really did not want you and anyone else in America to be able to provide a service to one another without them being able to veto it or charge rent on it.

If you think about the rollout of caller ID, $6.99 per month when it rolled out.

This was what it cost you to find out who was calling you before you picked up the phone.

You can't do that once people have modems.

There is no caller ID for email.