Court Allows Regional Phone Firms to Offer Voice Storage

U.S. District Court Judge Harold H. Greene cleared the way Monday for regional Bell telephone companies such as Pacific Bell to offer certain new computerized information services, including voice storage and electronic mail.

But Greene refused to retreat from an earlier decision last Sept. 10 in which he allowed the companies to transmit information but not create or manipulate the content.

“It is the court’s expectation that this easing of the information services restriction will avoid anti-competitive effects, and that it will at the same time bring this nation closer to the enjoyment of the full benefits of the information age,” Greene wrote in Monday’s 66-page decision.

Voice storage and retrieval services would allow consumers to rely on their local phone networks for storing and retrieving messages, functions now performed by telephone answering machines. Electronic mail, a service now available in many private phone systems, allows the transfer of messages from computer to computer. In addition, Greene said the seven regional Bell companies can perform certain computerized “gateway” services such as sending data, managing billing and enabling computers to “speak” to one another over their networks.

The Bell companies have lobbied heavily within the Reagan Administration and in Congress for legislation to remove all restrictions against their entry into the rapidly developing business of providing electronic information services. Even so, Arthur C. Latno, spokesman for Pacific Telesis, PacBell’s San Francisco-based parent, welcomed Greene’s ruling as “very encouraging.”