From as early as 1913, AT&T had been battling the U.S. government over its monopoly control of the nation’s phone service. That it was, in fact, a monopoly was undeniable. If you were making a phone call in the United States at any point between 1930 and 1984, you were almost without exception using AT&T’s network. That monopoly power made the company immensely profitable, since it faced no significant competition. But for seventy years, AT&T managed to keep the regulators at bay by convincing them that the phone network was a “natural monopoly” and
