Irving Kristol, the former socialist turned neoconservative editor of The Public Interest, once commented that U.S. v. AT&T was less a conventional antitrust case than a “modern day variant on classical Marxist class warfare theories,” because it was fundamentally a struggle for power between a class of bureaucrats in the government—lawyers and technocrats in the Justice department, the FCC’s common carrier bureau, and in Congress—and the class of bureaucrats who ran the nation’s phone system, the one million employees of AT&T.
