For reasons far beyond Bernie Strassburg’s control, the Common Carrier Bureau’s quiet methods of regulation, known in the phone industry as “continuing surveillance,” broke down during the 1960s. Rapid technological advances in fields such as satellites and microwaves began to raise questions about how well the Bell System would keep up in an emerging “information age.” More important was the political furor that erupted during the late 1960s, when AT&T’s service crises in New York and elsewhere, together with the popular suspicions of the period about big corporations, led to an outcry in
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