1. Jill Hills, The Democracy Gap (New York: Greenwood Press, 1991) p. 51. It should be noted that Hills’ use of the term ‘structural regulation’ is not related to references to state structures found in this book.
2. These companies collectively constituted about three–quarters of AT&T’s 1981 assets of $145 billion. On the divestiture, see Jeremy Tunstall, Communications Deregulation (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986) pp. 89— 114. Also see US Department of Commerce, ‘NTIA Telecom 2000: Charting the Course for a New Century’ (Washington, DC: NTIA, October 1988) pp. 430–3.
3. While communications ‘deregulation’ most notably began with a Supreme Court ruling in 1968 permitting users of the telephone system to connect non–AT&T equipment onto the system, the AT&T divestiture constituted a radical leap toward structural regulation due to its mammoth scale. Just before its divestiture in 1984, AT&T was the largest corporation in the world. Called the Bell System, it employed almost 1 million people and its annual revenues were nearly $70 billion, constituting approximately 2% of US GNP.
4. These RBOCs are Nynex, Bell Atlantic, Bell South, Ameritech, Pacific Telesis, US West and Southwestern Bell. Judge Greene barred them from taking part in three areas of business: long–distance services; telecommunication hardware manufacturing; and the provision of information services. The RBOCs always have considered these conditions to have been unreasonable, and have waged protracted campaigns to win the legal right to offer ‘content–related’ services, including the delivery of television signals direct into homes through telephone lines. The federal courts defined ‘information services’ as a broad range of activities, from cable television to electronic publishing. In 1970, the FCC adopted rules that prevented potential telephone companies competing with cable television operators in order to provide the latter with an opportunity to establish themselves. These commonly called ‘telco–cable cross–ownership rules’ were incorporated into the Cable Communications Policy Act of 1984 and involved an amendment to the Communications Act of 1934. These provisions were radically rolled back, however, through the Telecommunications Act of 1996. This extraordinary piece of regulatory liberalization legislation will be addressed in chapter 7.
5. Robert R. Bruce, ‘Intelsat in Transition,’ Chronicle of International Communication, VI (3) (April 1985) 5–7.