ABSTRACT
The telecommunications industry was experiencing a meltdown as Enron was imploding. That industry had once been limited to telephones using landlines, a business that was completely dominated by AT&T. Commonly dubbed “Ma Bell,” a reference to its lineage from Alexander Graham Bell, that colossus was broken up in 1982 by an antitrust suit brought by the Justice Department that lasted nearly ten years. Under the settlement decree resolving that case, AT&T spun off its operations into seven regional operating companies, which were required to operate independently of one another. The regional companies were dubbed the “Baby Bells.”
