Many of us remember when the U.S. Department of Justice broke up the old telephone monopoly. As Tim Wu describes it in his compelling history The Master Switch, the breakup of the Bell system unleashed a powerful round of innovation. We enjoy the fruits of that innovation today.
The open Internet, and many of the devices and applications we now take for granted, would have been anathema to the giant phone company that suppressed the answering machine for decades and resisted all attempts to interconnect with its network.
