Washington Should Repair the Phone Mess It Made
Consumers won a big one when they forced the Coca-Cola company to restore the brand now rightly renamed Classic. But an even larger triumph lies at hand.
The breakup of the telephone company has inflicted on Americans far greater injuries, insults and rip-offs than anything ever dreamed of in the poor philosophy of the soft-drink makers. But, with a little pressure in the right place, those wrongs can be set right; the Everest of consumer affairs virtually begs to be scaled.
Years--nay, centuries--from now, men will scratch their heads and wonder by what crazy chain of circumstance the normally sensible American people allowed the best communications system in the world to be scrapped. Not by somebody armed with the people’s mandate--say, the President or Congress. Not by a technical expert or even a designated wise man with special experience in practical affairs and the ways of mankind. But by a lowly federal judge--unelected, unrenowned, unqualified.
Except for having a somewhat poor sense of his limitations, Judge Harold Greene of the U.S. District Court cannot fairly be blamed. This, in brief, is what happened, and why a remedy exists:
After the Watergate scandal demonstrated the corruption of the Justice Department under President Richard M. Nixon, special wraps were put around the attorney general. With power at the top thus restrained, the zealots of the antitrust division seized the occasion to file against AT&T;, in 1975, an indictment under the Sherman Act barring “monopolization” and “actions in restraint of trade.” The case was assigned to Greene’s court in the District of Columbia.
There it languished for seven years while, as in Dickens’ famous case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, there accumulated pleas and motions, answers and rejoinders, injunctions and affidavits, and other “mountains of costly nonsense.” The Gerald R. Ford Administration, determined to look like Goody Two Shoes, did not dare arrest the process. The Jimmy Carter Administration, with its populist flavor, did not want to.
By the time that the Reagan Administration came to power, AT&T; had had enough. It wanted to compete in the burgeoning field of data processing through telecommunications. To enter the new field, the company had to abandon its near monopoly in telephone service with the attendant regulation by the Federal Communications Commission. That meant settling the suit with the Justice Department.
President Reagan’s Justice Department wanted no part in the antitrust action. But it took a casual attitude toward the terms of the settlement. Atty. Gen. William French Smith, a former director of Pacific Bell, recused himself. William Baxter, the attorney general in charge of antitrust matters, was chiefly interested in pushing the telephone company into the internationally competitive information field.
So the exact terms of settlement--the consent decree, as it was called--were left up to Greene. In his ruling the judge acknowledged the possibility of error. His decision to break up AT&T; into one national company (also called AT&T;) and seven separate regional companies was made subject to revision. A formal review is scheduled for January, 1987, three years after the decree went into effect. In the interim the Justice Department can seek adjustments at any time.
By now, angry citizens have accumulated complaints as numerous as autumn leaves. Double- and even triple-billing is irksome. The rise in the cost of the service is no joke. Neither is having to hunt around among various entities for equipment and repairs. The outright chiseling that is practiced by some of the new competition in equipment and repairs has become scandalous. But, for purposes of convenience, two general kinds of trouble can be identified:
First, there are restrictions on the kinds of business that can be done by the seven regional phone companies. Under Greene’s decree they are limited to local services.In fact, many could provide local, long-distance and overseas services. In that way customers would not have to make regional calls through one company, long-distance calls through a second and (in many cases) international calls through a third. They could make all calls through a single company, and receive a single bill for all services.
Second, there are limitations on the sale of equipment by the regional phone companies. Though they handle the bulk of the traffic, they can’t sell you phones. Equipment has to come from AT&T; or its manifold competitors, including many sleazy firms that have just sprung up. Hence customers have to deal with more than a single company, and often with crooked outfits.
In these two areas alone, the amendment of Greene’s decree would end numerous abuses and inconveniences. As to how it might be done, well, the trick is to find Atty. Gen. Edwin Meese III when he’s not out busting marijuana growers. He can easily petition for a review of the decision at any time. Indeed, if he doesn’t, and if the Democrats play it with any skill at all, the Administration may find itself on the wrong side of an issue that is driving millions of Americans up the wall.
