>And yet, over the years, the baby bells got swallowed back up into AT&T.
>It's one thing to break 'em up. It's another to make it stick

When Bell Atlantic and two other merged into Verizon, I had a Lucas-like bad feeling about it. And it came true - on pretty much every step of the one-year experience (in redmondlian sense of the word) I had with them, plus some lesser tremors later, they were exactly the rude and fugly corporation I feared they would be. In my time there, only HP came out worse, but Verizon is a very close second.

Perhaps Verizon would have invented the web on its own, but it would cost you between $100 and $500 a month, you'd be billed for each service separately, you wouldn't be able to have FTP alone as it would come bundled with gopher telnet and ping, and whatever was in the additional checkboxes that you didn't know you had to click to opt out would not be available for online cancellation. You'd still have to flatten your ear holding a phone to it, while you're transferred to the sixth representative who will be with you shortly.