Baby Bells Get Freer Entry to Information Services : Telecommunications: A federal ruling allows local phone firms to provide such services without setting up subsidiaries.

Local phone companies were allowed freer entry to the $9-billion electronic information business in a federal ruling Thursday that allows them to offer information services without setting up separate subsidiaries.

But consumer groups immediately attacked the ruling, saying that it might allow local phone companies to subsidize information services by raising local phone rates. Information service competitors, including newspapers and database services, also complain that the phone companies may be getting unfair advantages.

The complex ruling said that the phone companies can “unbundle” phone services and sell them separately. But they must offer full access to their lines to competitors, and must also offer them equal access to the massive information on large corporate phone customers--such as telephone habits and numbers called--that now gives them a major marketing advantage.

Pacific Bell welcomed most aspects of the ruling. “We’re eager to get into the information services business,” said Steven Harris, director of regulatory planning for the company. As an example of a service his company could now offer, he said that “you could order a daily wake-up call that says ‘Good morning, it’s 67 degrees and the Dodgers won last night,’ or gives stock prices, or whatever you wanted.”

What the ruling means for business telephone customers is that they will have greater choices in choosing companies to provide services, such as electronic yellow pages that employees can call up on their computer screens. But while the cost of some services may go down, others may go up.

For residential customers, the impact is less clear, because the ruling lets the advantage in providing “enhanced” phone services (call waiting, voice mail) to homes remain with local phone companies.

But what some customers fear is that their rates will go up. At issue is whether the phone companies will be able to raise prices of basic phone service in order to subsidize computer and voice-data services and make them more competitive.

The FCC is requiring the Baby Bells to keep separate accounting systems for the information services, and a government spokesman says that fears that local phone rates will rise as a result of the ruling are “absolutely false.”

But some skeptics say allowing the information services business to exist inside the phone companies is a bad idea. “This is an invitation for them to go out and dump costs on captive customers in order to be competitive,” said Audrie Krause, executive director of a group called Toward Utility Rate Normalization.

Their competitors, including data-base companies and newspapers, which offer information by phone as well as in print, have been lobbying hard against the Baby Bells. They say the local phone companies have an unfair advantage in the information business because of their steady basic phone revenue and the vast store of market information they hold in phone bills.

The electronic information business, which includes everything from 900 pay-per-call horoscope and sports information lines to computer data bases accessed by phone by large corporations, is huge and growing fast. According to the Commerce Department, revenue in the industry totaled $9 billion in 1990 and is expected to grow 20% annually for the next five years.

Leslie Barhyte, legislative representative for the American Newspaper Publisher’s Assn., said her group did not like the fact that telephone companies didn’t have to set up separate subsidiaries for their information businesses. “Cross subsidization (of information services by basic phone rates) could . . . help them undercut competitors,” she said.