The Deal of the Century: The Breakup of AT&T

by Steve Coll

But amid all this self-interested clamor, there was one voice whose shrill and demanding tone rose clearly above the rest—the American Newspaper Publishers Association (ANPA). Perhaps because of its members’ long exposure to the rhetoric of politicians, the ANPA was surpassingly adept at couching its patently selfish demands in the appealing language of the public interest. The publishers were scared stiff by the prospect of a deregulated AT&T. It was their opinion that the future of the newspaper industry lay in what they called “electronic publishing”—videotext services, links between newspapers and cable television, computerized information banks, and so on. AT&T was anxious to enter these markets, and it had been working for some time to develop prototype services. But the ANPA argued that because AT&T owned some of the means of transmission of electronic publications—the long-distance phone lines—it would be unfair to allow it also to sell electronic services. Then AT&T would own both the product and some means by which publishers would transmit competitive services. Justice argued vigorously in its reply comments that the “essential facilities bottleneck” had been broken by the proposed divestiture of the operating companies and that the new AT&T should be allowed to compete freely with the publishers. It was essentially an issue about whether Greene should intervene in the terms of future competition between some of the country’s largest corporations—AT&T, Gannett, ...