<story><title>US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case</title><url>https://www.ft.com/content/f6e84608-e0e5-48c5-a0eb-dde7675fb608</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>relistan</author><text>Hilarious to see all the people lamenting the break-up of AT&amp;amp;T. That break-up sparked the long distance phone race, which became the driving force for the massive laying of fiber optics... which enabled the Internet boom of the 1990s.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bityard</author><text>Breaking up AT&amp;amp;T was unquestionably the right call. (So to say.)&lt;p&gt;Long distance was expensive for quite a while even after the break-up. If you called up an out-of-state friend or relative to catch up, you expected the call to cost you at least a few bucks. (And you hoped they would be the ones to call you next time.) Even into the 90&amp;#x27;s, long distance at $0.10&amp;#x2F;minute was considered cheap. And in most rural areas, everywhere past a mile or so out of town was long distance.&lt;p&gt;I remember buying long-distance calling cards to bring our phone costs down. For about 5 years, it was cheaper to just get a local-only phone line and then buy your long-distance as phone cards. Each card came with a certain number of minutes pre-loaded. You&amp;#x27;d dial the 1-800 number on the back, scratch off your PIN, enter it, and then you&amp;#x27;d dial your destination number. Other than the hassle of buying and using the card, the major downside was that your own number didn&amp;#x27;t (usually) show up on the caller ID.&lt;p&gt;They were also good if you stayed in hotels a lot, since hotels would charge upward of usurious amounts for both local and long-distance calls but they would typically allow toll-free calls to go through without charge.</text></comment>
<story><title>US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case</title><url>https://www.ft.com/content/f6e84608-e0e5-48c5-a0eb-dde7675fb608</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>relistan</author><text>Hilarious to see all the people lamenting the break-up of AT&amp;amp;T. That break-up sparked the long distance phone race, which became the driving force for the massive laying of fiber optics... which enabled the Internet boom of the 1990s.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>CSMastermind</author><text>My understanding was that most of the internet infrastructure was laid by Bell before their break-up because they projected video calling being a huge use case in the future.</text></comment>