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Kingsbury Commitment
The Kingsbury Commitment is a 1913 out-of-court settlement of the United States government's antitrust challenge against the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T) for AT&T's then-growing vertical monopoly in the telephone industry. In return for the government's agreement not to pursue its case against the company as a monopolist, AT&T agreed to divest the controlling interest it had acquired in the Western Union telegraph company, and to allow non-competing independent telephone companies to interconnect with the AT&T long-distance network. History In 1907, Theodore N. Vail became president of AT&T for the second time. Immediately, he steered the company into a new direction, in terms of vision, company organization, and technology. He envisioned telephone service as a public utility, and the future of the American telephone industry as a unified system of companies under the lead of his company. This required technical standards understood and accepted by all player ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
American Telephone And Telegraph Company
AT&T Inc. is an American multinational telecommunications holding company headquartered at Whitacre Tower in Downtown Dallas, Texas. It is the world's largest telecommunications company by revenue and the third largest provider of mobile telephone services in the U.S. , AT&T was ranked 13th on the ''Fortune'' 500 rankings of the largest United States corporations, with revenues of $168.8 billion. During most of the 20th century, AT&T had a monopoly on phone service in the United States. The company began its history as the American District Telegraph Company, formed in St. Louis in 1878. After expanding services to Arkansas, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas, through a series of mergers, it became Southwestern Bell Telephone Company in 1920, which was then a subsidiary of American Telephone and Telegraph Company. The latter was a successor of the original Bell Telephone Company founded by Alexander Graham Bell in 1877. The American Bell Telephone Company formed the American Telep ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Willis Graham Act
The Willis Graham Act of 1921 effectively established telephone companies as natural monopolies, citing that "there is nothing to be gained by local competition in the telephone industry." The law effectively released AT&T from terms of its Kingsbury Commitment, allowing the company to acquire competing telephone companies under the oversight of the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC). Background The American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T) was incorporated in 1885 as a wholly owned subsidiary of American Bell. On December 30, 1899, AT&T acquired the assets of American Bell and became the parent company of the Bell System. For extending telephone service nationwide, new technologies had to be developed to propagate telephony signals over ever-increasing distances. Until Bell's second patent expired in 1894, Bell Telephone was the only company that could legally operate telephone systems in the United States. Between 1894 and 1904, after Bell's patents expired, over six th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Legal History Of The United States
Legal history or the history of law is the study of how law has evolved and why it has changed. Legal history is closely connected to the development of civilisations and operates in the wider context of social history. Certain jurists and historians of legal process have seen legal history as the recording of the evolution of laws and the technical explanation of how these laws have evolved with the view of better understanding the origins of various legal concepts; some consider legal history a branch of intellectual history. Twentieth-century historians viewed legal history in a more contextualised manner - more in line with the thinking of social historians. They have looked at legal institutions as complex systems of rules, players and symbols and have seen these elements interact with society to change, adapt, resist or promote certain aspects of civil society. Such legal historians have tended to analyse case histories from the parameters of social-science inquiry, usin ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Harper & Row
Harper is an American publishing house, the flagship imprint of global publisher HarperCollins based in New York City. History J. & J. Harper (1817–1833) James Harper and his brother John, printers by training, started their book publishing business J. & J. Harper in New York City in 1817. Their two brothers, Joseph Wesley and Fletcher, joined them in the mid-1820s. Harper & Brothers (1833–1962) The company changed its name to "Harper & Brothers" in 1833. The headquarters of the publishing house were located at 331 Pearl Street, facing Franklin Square in Lower Manhattan (about where the Manhattan approach to the Brooklyn Bridge lies today). Harper & Brothers began publishing '' Harper's New Monthly Magazine'' in New York City in 1850. The brothers also published ''Harper's Weekly'' (starting in New York City in June 1857), '' Harper's Bazar'' (starting in New York City in November 2, 1867), and '' Harper's Young People'' (starting in New York City in 1879). George B ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
John Brooks (writer)
John Brooks (December 5, 1920 – July 27, 1993) was a writer and longtime contributor to ''The New Yorker'' magazine, where he worked for many years as a staff writer, specializing in financial topics. Brooks was also the author of several books, both fiction and non-fiction, the best known of which was an examination of the financial shenanigans of the 1960s Wall Street bull market. Early life John Nixon Brooks was born on December 5, 1920, in New York City, but grew up in Trenton, New Jersey. He graduated from Kent School in Kent, Connecticut in 1938 and Princeton University in 1942. After graduation Brooks joined the United States Army Air Forces, in which he served as a communications and radar officer from 1942 until 1945. He was aboard the First United States Army headquarters ship on D-Day during the Allied invasion of Normandy in 1944. After leaving the military, Brooks went to work for ''Time'' magazine, where he became a contributing editor. He worked at ''Time'' for o ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Telecommunications Act Of 1996
The Telecommunications Act of 1996 is a United States federal law enacted by the 104th United States Congress on January 3, 1996, and signed into law on February 8, 1996, by President Bill Clinton. It primarily amended Chapter 5 of Title 47 of the United States Code, The act was the first significant overhaul of United States telecommunications law in more than sixty years, amending the Communications Act of 1934, and represented a major change in American telecommunication law, because it was the first time that the Internet was included in broadcasting and spectrum allotment.The Telecommunications Act of 1996. Title 3, sec. 301. Retrieved frofcc.gov (2011) The goal of the law was to "let anyone enter any communications business – to let any communications business compete in any market against any other." The legislation's primary goal was deregulation of the converging broadcasting and telecommunications markets. The law's regulatory policies have been criticized, includi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sherman Antitrust Act
The Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 (, ) is a United States antitrust law which prescribes the rule of free competition among those engaged in commerce. It was passed by United States Congress, Congress and is named for Senator John Sherman, its principal author. The Sherman Act broadly prohibits 1) anticompetitive agreements and 2) unilateral conduct that monopolizes or attempts to monopolize the relevant market. The Act authorizes the United States Department of Justice, Department of Justice to bring Lawsuit, suits to enjoin (i.e. prohibit) conduct violating the Act, and additionally authorizes private parties injured by conduct violating the Act to bring suits for treble damages (i.e. three times as much money in damages as the violation cost them). Over time, the federal courts have developed a body of law under the Sherman Act making certain types of anticompetitive conduct per se illegal, and subjecting other types of conduct to case-by-case analysis regarding whether th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
United States Telecom Association
The United States Telecom Association (USTelecom) is an organization that represents telecommunications-related businesses based in the United States. As a trade association, it represent the converged interests of the country's telecommunications industry. Member companies represent a diverse set of communications-related businesses, including those that provide wireless, Internet, cable television, long distance, local exchange, and voice services. Members include large publicly traded communications carriers as well as small telephone cooperatives that serve only a few hundred customers in urban and rural areas. The organization was founded as the Independent Telephone Association of America in 1897, and represented the telecommunication industry of North America that was not affiliated with the Bell System led by the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T). History The United States Telecom Association (USTelecom) was founded in Chicago, Illinois, on May 17, 1897, whe ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Baby Bell
The Regional Bell Operating Companies (RBOC) are the result of '' United States v. AT&T'', the U.S. Department of Justice antitrust suit against the former American Telephone & Telegraph Company (later known as AT&T Corp.). On January 8, 1982, AT&T Corp. settled the suit and agreed to divest its local exchange service operating companies. Effective January 1, 1984, AT&T Corp.'s local operations were split into seven independent Regional Bell Operating Companies known as the Baby Bells. RBOCs were originally known as Regional Holding Companies (RHCs). Currently, three companies have the RBOCs as predecessors: AT&T, Verizon, and Lumen Technologies. Some other companies are holding onto smaller segments of the companies. Baby Bells A baby bell is local telephone company in the United States that was in existence at the time of the breakup of AT&T into the resulting Regional Bell Operating Companies (RBOCs), also known as the "Baby Bells." Sometimes also referred to as an "I ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bell System Divestiture
The breakup of the Bell System was mandated on January 8, 1982, by an agreed consent decree providing that AT&T Corporation would, as had been initially proposed by AT&T, relinquish control of the Bell Operating Companies, which had provided local telephone service in the United States. This effectively took the monopoly that was the Bell System and split it into entirely separate companies that would continue to provide telephone service. AT&T would continue to be a provider of long-distance service, while the now-independent Regional Bell Operating Companies (RBOCs), nicknamed the "Baby Bells", would provide local service, and would no longer be directly supplied with equipment from AT&T subsidiary Western Electric. This divestiture was initiated by the filing in 1974 by the United States Department of Justice of an antitrust lawsuit against AT&T. AT&T was, at the time, the sole provider of telephone service throughout most of the United States. Furthermore, most telephonic ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Carterfone
The Carterfone is a device invented by Thomas Carter. It manually connects a two-way radio system to the telephone system, allowing someone on the radio to talk to someone on the phone. This makes it a direct predecessor to today's autopatch. Description The device was acoustically, but not electrically, connected to the public switched telephone network. It was electrically connected to the base station of the mobile radio system, and got its power from the base station. All electrical parts were encased in bakelite, an early plastic. When someone on a two-way radio wished to speak to someone on phone, or "landline" (e.g., "Central dispatch, patch me through to McGarrett"), the station operator at the base would dial the telephone number. When callers on the radio and on the telephone were both in contact with the base station operator, the handset of the operator's telephone was placed on a cradle built into the Carterfone device. A voice-operated switch in the Car ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Communications Act Of 1934
The Communications Act of 1934 is a United States federal law signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on June 19, 1934 and codified as Chapter 5 of Title 47 of the United States Code, et seq. The Act replaced the Federal Radio Commission with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). It also transferred regulation of interstate telephone services from the Interstate Commerce Commission to the FCC. The first section of the Act originally read as follows: "For the purpose of regulating interstate and foreign commerce in communication by wire and radio so as to make available, so far as possible to all the people of the United States a rapid, efficient, Nation-wide, and world-wide wire and radio communication service with adequate facilities at reasonable charges, for the purpose of the national defense, for the purpose of promoting safety of life and property through the use of wire and radio communication, and for the purpose of securing a more effective execution of this pol ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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