The Data Communications Battle

CAVEATS

The "data communications battle" is not the sole possession of the third quarter of the twentieth century: neither the concept nor the cast of characters is unique. Most discouraging of all the tenets involved in the current feud is the realization that all this has happened before and has happened in the same foible-shrouded milieu. The principals of the current flourish of rhetoric—the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T) and the several "independent" telephone companies of the United States (collectively known as common-carriers), private businessmen engaged in enterprises akin to those of common-carriers but not licensed as such, federal and state governments and/or agencies, and the consumer of the purveyed services—have changed in only a limited fashion during the first and second rounds of this checker game. They remain, however, constant in that the individual consumer is on one end, purveyors of services (ranging from the fully regulated common-carriers to the manufacturers who are required to design and build equipment to meet regulated specifications) are on the other, and some form of governmental function attempting to act as liaison/regulator/disinterested party is in the middle.

FCC

On 25 May 1971 the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) handed down another of its "historic decisions. "This one was primarily concerned with the rate and pricing structure(s) it would allow for common-carriers, but it was brought about through the insistent cries of a small group of corporations. These corporations had not been dealt the legalized monopoly protections of common-carriers but had nevertheless sought to provide services in a market where (they allege) the common-carriers have not succeeded in providing services to a small but rapidly-growing number of consumers. The service involved in the current controversy is the provision of data communications facilities—facilities which enable one computer to "talk" (transmit data) to one or more other computers or to communicate between input and output terminals (such as teletypewriters) with or without computers. For almost a century, transmission of such data among end-users (such as the early telegraph operators at railroad stations) has been virtually the sole responsibility of common-carriers (telephone companies); the major exception has been the actions by some railroad and oil companies to establish and maintain their own lines. The admissibility of private firms other than common-carriers (such as oil and railroad companies) to the small group of companies providing transmission service may seem, at the outset, significant. The difference which initially allowed such firms to establish their own communications systems has become the nexus of the current argument before the nationwide regulator of these services—the FCC.

The distinction is that (1) the railroads, for instance, built, maintained, and paid for their own lines, including remuneration for rights-of-way over non-railroad-owned properties, (2) the only communications traversing these lines were railroad company communications and (3) the railroads were, in addition, not providing a "switched-service system"—that is, a system in which any one end-user could communicate with any other end-user through switching devices. A nonswitched system is feasible, of course, for railroad companies, since they have a finite number of end-users, and they are sure of the growth rate per annum in number of users: telephone companies can only make guesses (although very well-educated ones) about the number of users and can only extrapolate, on the basis of many parameters, the number of users to be added or removed from the system in any given year.

The picturesque data communications market at the turn of the century, with firearm-laden cowpokes braving the wilds of western North America to get the railroad (and its communications links) through to establish some "civilization" west of the Columbia Gap, has grown phenomenally in the years since then. But the most significant growth has been in the past fifteen years, increasing communications traffic by orders of magnitude. Businesses have found an avenue (and, in some cases, even a need) for transmitting their daily transaction reports, inventory summaries, and corporate memoranda, inter alia, between and/or among branch offices and corporate headquarters: credit-card companies, and companies which do business utilizing credit cards, daily transmit reams of information detailing lost/stolen cards, attempted frauds, and account statuses to a central computation center and thence (in some cases) to every card-honoring retail outlet in the country! But while these businesses may utilize their communications links intensively from midnight to six a.m. daily, they might have little or no use for those lines during the day; further, during the day they may wish to communicate with other businesses which they need not contact during the midnight-to-six period. If the businesses involved do not happen to be fond of paying for services they will not use, a demand will arise for rates commensurate with the need for certain facilities at certain times of the day and for certain durations.

COMPETITION

Intransigence on the part of common-carriers (notably AT&T, by whose rates most of the non-Bell common-carriers in the country abide), to modify rate structures for the benefit of businesses who wanted primarily information transmission and not voice communication and only at certain times of the day, were the prime factors in motivating Jack Goeken, a young entrepreneur from Joliet, Illinois, into forming Microwave Communications Incorporated (MCI) and filing an application with the FCC for a specialized common-carrier communications system between Chicago and St. Louis.

Since Goeken's 1963 application, there have been three categories of occurrences bearing upon long-distance (as opposed to intra-city) data communications:

(1) By 30 June 1970, less than seven years from MCI's application, a total of 1,713 applications for similar systems or expansions of MCI's system were before the FCC;

(2) The three major common-carriers in the nation—AT&T, General Telephone and Electronics, and Western Union—rapidly shifted gears and began readjusting their rate structures to be competitive with those offerable by MCI and most of the other 1,712 applicants; and, most significantly,

(3) AT&T which, of the three, has the most resources upon which to draw, began via its army of corporate lawyers to file with the Commission a large number of "points of inquiry," requesting that the Commission make a ruling based upon the apparent facts and the three carriers' (but primarily AT&T's) long record of dependable service to telephone and data users in the country—these points often bordering upon requests for the FCC's flat denial of the specialized common-carrier concept.

On 25 May 1971 the FCC finally made its full position known. Influenced, no doubt, by the December 1968 report of the President's Task Force on Communications Policy, which endorsed the specialized common-carrier concept, the FCC determined that AT&T's virtual monopoly of private line communications service was at an end. The Commission authorized competition for specialized communications by means of varying rate structures and offered, features. As summarized by the WASHINGTON POST News Service on 27 May, "The decision constituted an indirect admonition to AT&T and Western Union that they have not been quick enough to introduce technological and service innovations." With the announcement of the FCC's decision, those two giants issued "conciliatory statements" noting that they would probably not initiate court action to appeal the Commission's unanimous decision.

By approximately the time of the decision, the Commission had on file some 1,900 applications from 33 separate firms to establish such specialized common-carrier services. Notable among these was a set of applications from firms whose conceptual approach was the same as MCI's but whose operational system had a slightly different tenor. The leader among these is Data Transmission Company (Datran), a subsidiary of University Computing Company, which, if its capital holds out, will endeavor to establish a nationwide "dialing service" for computers, through which any one computer linked to the system could interconnect with any other computer on the system. Designed exclusively for data transmission, rather than the multipurpose use proposed by such companies as MCI (whose systems provide a more direct competition for AT&T's Long Lines Division), Datran's system would be primarily digital microwave, using computers as switching devices. While the regulatory door has now been truly opened for competition in communications systems, it appears that the FCC may well be headed down the same path it has traversed twice before.

ROUND ONE—RADIO

The first time American society encountered the user-purveyor-regulator communications triangle was at the dawn of modern devices with the development of wireless communications at the turn of this century. Chronologically, the pattern was initiated by Scottish physicist James Maxwell in 1864 (theories of electromagnetism and electric wave theory), Thomas Edison's experiments in wireless land communication systems for railroads (circa 1884), German physicist Heinrich Hertz' development of electromagnetic propagation (radio waves) through space in 1887, Guglielmo Marconi's investigations in 1894 of telegraphy without wires based upon Hertzian principles, and the development of the vacuum tube (1904-1908) by British electrical engineer Sir John Ambrose Fleming, Canadian Reginald Fessenden, and American Dr. Lee De Forest.

JEALOUSIES

Each of these pioneers was extremely jealous of the others and sought to develop his own contribution into a viable enterprise. And so, beginning with Marconi in 1897, a plethora of patents, infringement rights, paper corporations, holding companies, and licensing agreements evolved. From this quaint mess emerged the corporate electrons of the twentieth century: American Telephone and Telegraph Company, Western Electric Company, General Electric, the Radio Corporation of America, and Westinghouse, among others. The early electronic equipment manufacturers (primarily limited to radio receivers) were severely bogged down until military operations came to the rescue during World War I. The government then asked all the companies to pool their resources and inventions to facilitate tactical communications systems development in exchange for legal protection against patent suits. Prior to this, each manufacturer had needed basic patents which were controlled by its competitors, each had refused to license the others, and thus, if any was to continue its operations, it would likely have become vulnerable to patent infringement suits.

The solution? Not quite. Adding to the mess was the fact that the ingenious Marconi had established the British Marconi and American Marconi Companies which, through cross-licensing, held rights to virtually every useful device or concept required by fledgling GE to produce radio sets. GE therefore developed a plan for a new company, to be controlled entirely by American capital, to gain control of a significant bundle of the major radio patents. Formed in 1919, the Radio Corporation of America had the funds to purchase all of the patents and assets of American Marconi and entered into cross-licensing agreements with GE, Westinghouse, and Western Electric. Needless to say, it took a commanding lead in the American radio field. Under the agreements, GE and Westinghouse held the exclusive right to manufacture radio receivers, RCA was the sole selling agent for the sets, and AT&T (through its manufacturing subsidiary, Western Electric) was granted the exclusive right to make, lease, and sell broadcast transmitters. In exchange, the various companies were awarded substantial stock holdings in RCA. These were true monopolies, developed with the covert blessing of and licensed by the federal government; and the were deemed additionally to be proper, since they ensured the colonies a place in the sun without relying upon developments made in and capitalized upon by the United Kingdom. Little thought was given, though, to the eventual consequences of such a series of moves.

AT&T constructed and operated radio station WEAF (now WNBC) in New York City. This high-powered operation was set up by the company to operate as a "toll" station and became the medium for the first commercially-sponsored program in the United States, holding the broadcast of a ten minute talk sponsored by the Queensboro Corporation (a Long Island realty company) on 28 August 1922. By this time, some far-sighted individuals (but few corporations) could begin to glimpse what was looming on the horizon. The stage was set, however, for the onslaught of technological and philosophical protagonists, almost all of whom thought they had "the answer" and consequently knew in which direction this new medium should go: the preliminaries became arguments for (1) the need to explore all of the possibilities of the medium before it was permitted access by the public (e.g., licensing of broadcast stations to private firms), (2) the need not to let the country go another second when they could be taking advantage (cf., "the people have a right to knowledge") of such a marvelous tool, (3) the manifest needs of the military, which, incidentally, never took a back seat to the development of the industry for civilian uses but can, nevertheless, be credited with encouraging many of the technological developments of the medium, and (4) the businessmen and corporations who saw the opportunity to capitalize on what they perceived to be the yearnings of the populace.

UNCLE SAM, THE RADIO MAN

The first attempt at federal regulation of wireless communications came with the Wireless Ship Act of 1910, forbidding any large, passenger carrying vessel to leave a U.S. port without adequate communications equipment and a skilled operator. In 1912, the United States became party to the first international radio treaty, when Congress vested licensing powers for the United States with the Secretary of Commerce. Regulation of broadcast stations and their frequencies, locations, and hours of operation was initially unsuccessful. A 1926 ruling by an Illinois federal district court held that the Secretary had no power to impose restrictions upon stations[1]. Later that same year the U.S. Attorney General issued an opinion along the same lines[2]. And the Secretary of Commerce, Herbert Hoover, was caught in the middle. "Completely frustrated…Hoover issued a public statement abandoning all his efforts to regulate radio and urging that the stations undertake, through gentlemen's agreements, to regulate themselves"[3].

Hoover had been called on the carpets for ministrations under the aegis of the 1910 and 1912 Acts. Rather than continue with the legal battles thereunder, and to provide a more cogent definition of the regulatory nature they sought to provide, Congress provided the Radio Act of 1927. The new 1927 Act, plus its successor, the Communications Act of 1934, gave teeth to the regulatory concept, primarily through more explicit legislation. These latter Acts were spawned, however, only after a short period of confusion in the broadcasters' scramble for radio frequencies: everybody wanted one, and nobody (since the fiascoes Hoover encountered) was going to oversee the frequencies' distribution. Enterprising businessmen would simply build a transmitter and some semblance of a studio and go on the air. In this early period of experience with wireless communications, the courts were beginning to develop approaches to defining competing interests in the air waves. However, the passage of the 1927 Act prevented the courts from applying their own emerging solution to the new problems presented by broadcasting, and imposed a regulatory approach upon a problem not yet really fully understood.[4]

The 1927 Act, in point of fact, was the first time a "freeze" was placed upon broadcast licenses—soon after enactment, all licenses were withdrawn, and sixty days were allowed for the submission of new applications, in order to give, as much as feasible, an "equal" footing to all applicants in the new allocation. The Federal Radio Commission, the agency established by the 1927 Act, was empowered to process and coordinate all of these applications (much as Hoover had attempted to do earlier), allocating frequency (location on the dial), power, and hours of operation to all but some 150 applicants (which were granted a special immunity, primarily based upon their tenure).

Through the 1934 Act, the FCC was established. This new agency was mandated the same scope of responsibilities as the Federal Radio Commission, except that it additionally was given control over wire communications in the form of regulation of telephone and telegraph companies. With the dawn of the FCC came the attempt to exercise control over all communications media and the possible realization by the government that conceptual orientation was more significant than a functional/operational approach. Although no dicta exist to this effect, it may be postulated that since radio was initially developed as a means of telegraphic communication without wires, it may have been thought that areas of interest in radio could be reflected back to the wire communication complexes. The latter, however, were not envisioned to be a significant problem at the time, since AT&T owned or manufactured virtually all wire communications devices and systems and the few independent (non-AT&T) companies that did exist could, in terms of technological feasibilities, always be connected to some portion of AT&T's system. The organization which was formed in 1901 with a capitalization of some $250 million—the American Telephone and Telegraph Company—had spanned an era including the labor pangs of the birth of wireless communications[5]. They were still involved in both media, and they would continue to be so.

ROUND TWO—TELEVISION

The television station license application moratorium of 1948 to 1952 (known as "the big freeze") did not come about quite as suddenly as the chaos in radio. In fact, the 1939 preview of television at the New York World's Fair came nearly 50 years after the original technological work had been done. The prenatal days of television seems to be around 1884, when the German scientist Paul Nipkow invented a scanning disc which made future developments possible. In 1923, Dr. V.K. Zworykin patented the forerunner of today's television camera, the iconoscope. The integration of radio and television technology took place primarily in the laboratories of RCA, CBS, and DuMont, rather than what might be expected in terms of technology transfer among independent researchers. Most significant about the evolution of television is the fact that this time, corporate capital was being ventured for these developments, in the hope that a commercially-viable product could be produced. It was not the demonstration of private venture capital by well-heeled inventors or their philanthropists attempting to, among other interests, advance science. The 1948 freeze was brought upon the industry primarily due to its headlong uncontrolled rush to get that first set into that first household—even if it did cost nearly $1,000 (1940s prices!) to purchase. The issues with which the FCC had to deal during the freeze revolved around the prescription of a technical standard for the transmission of video information and, attempting to read its crystal ball, how this standard could be eventually extended to include broadcast of color information without modification of television receivers and another potential "freeze." The corporate agents of influence and change in this case were not the established common-carriers or those who had been in the communications business, whether wired or wireless, before, but they included relative newcomers to telecommunications: the DuMont Laboratories, the Columbia Broadcasting System (the last independently-established network), and the Radio Corporation of America.

Although only three of the six major purveyors of broadcast programs since the birth of radio (American Broadcasting Company, AT&T, CBS, DuMont Laboratories, Mutual Broadcasting System, and the National Broadcasting Company as a subsidiary of RCA) were working on the development of television, and the FCC had been noticeably and unusually responsive to the problems plaguing the industry, the physical (i.e., electrical) establishment of networks was almost excruciatingly slow in realization. AT&T did not complete the transcontinental network hookup until September 1951. The nearly 17 million television sets in American households by the end of the freeze had been receiving their "network" programs virtually entirely by kinescope, a film reproduction process by way of which programs were transported from coast to coast, somewhat as video taped programs are now recorded and stored. Kinescopes were produced at a network facility on one coast (usually the East), flown by commercial airliner to other stations, and shown on a local-only basis, as if it were a live program (since networks for video transmission had not yet been established).

Why AT&T was so lethargic in establishment of the transcontinental video network can only be guessed at, but it is probable that, conservative as she is of her resources and hesitant as she is of making incorrect moves that will impinge upon her revenues, "Ma Bell" waited until standards for transmission through the air were well-detailed and the precise amount of the spectrum which each television channel would utilize was specified before she made a commitment to the nationwide hookup. Another possible consideration is that long-range video transmission was no simple technological task (even today, these networks boggle the mind of many an engineer), and AT&T could not guarantee the fidelity and picture quality that the networks demanded; so, rather than provide inferior service, she provided no service at all.

ROUND THREE—DATA COMMUNICATIONS

We come now to the communications complex of the 1970s. The United States again hears cries of "restraint of trade" and "protection of public utilities." Whether communications common-carriers are public utilities has been argued by legal giants in the hearing rooms of virtually every public utilities commission in the country; but rather than cite chapter and verse of this multitude of barristers' briefs, it is fair to say that a communications common-carrier is considered de facto a "public trust." The common-carrier has been granted what the public utilities commissions term a "legal monopoly." This is where the waters part in the decision by a given regulatory agency: one corporation shall be franchised to do business, while others are legally excluded from business. The rationalization for granting of such monopolies has been a rather simple argument: Corporation A has the capital to proceed with certain installations of equipment or purchases of existing equipment and petitions the regulatory agency to allow it (Corporation A) the latitude to service all the needs of a given community because, due to economies of scale, it is able to service them better than if other companies were in there interfering with the operation. It is often mentioned that one might have to talk through several competing telephone companies' switching offices, for example, in order to call a neighbor across the street. The rights of exclusivity are usually granted the petitioner, since, in addition to the legal horsepower, he is able to demonstrate many other such systems, in the same state or elsewhere, which are operating in a "satisfactory" manner.

Unfortunately, the satisfactory manner is determined not by the number of accolades from customers but from the lack of mail containing complaints: the logic seems to say that the null hypothesis is invalid because it is null. Should complaint-laden mail begin to appear at the offices of the regulatory agency, or the common-carrier itself (it is particularly effective to call a corporate vice-president of your telephone company if they have a service complaint—a significant amount of action will result), the administrative machinery of the common-carrier is called into play rather quickly and the "problem" is either solved post-haste or extensive correspondence (read: flak) is generated and placed in the regulatory agency's files regarding the complexities of the problem, past attempts to deal with such problems, the common-carrier's strained fiscal position, and the number of men and women working 'round the clock to service customers' woes. When tariff review time comes around, the carrier (which may be your natural gas, electricity, cable television, or telephone supplier) will roll out the big guns, point to all the memoranda it has filed with the regulatory agency, call in its corporate counsellors, and proceed to demonstrate, oh so rationally, that it cannot continue to progress without some fiscal remedies.

The most disenchanting fact, with which this article cannot purport to deal within its time-and-space frame but which has been mentioned often within these pages, concerns the lack of competition (monopoly). If, say, telephone companies were forced to deal competitively for the right to service each household (and thus required by the customer to provide high-quality service at the lowest rates), the incentive for profits might lead each such utility to make its operations more efficient and thus more cost-effective in a longer time frame. Few utilities, though, would desire to exchange the protective umbrella of their friendly state public utility commission for the harsh realities of the marketplace.

The legal monopoly afforded communications common-carriers by State regulatory agencies on intrastate matters and the FCC or ICC on interstate matters has made modern communications in many ways very convenient (not to be confused with fair or cost-effective). Telephone companies, the prime carriers of electromagnetic information, are naturally concerned with making money out of their ventures. Ma Bell has millions of miles of cable and loads of microwave facilities spread across this country, carrying information from one local telephone company to another via an administrative subsection called the Long-Lines Division. Should the companies at each (receiving or transmitting) end be a member of the Bell System, the telephone call you place from Florida to Oregon may be handled totally by equipment owned and serviced by AT&T or one of its subsidiaries. While this may be entirely satisfactory for a telephone conversation, the system is not prepared to meet the requirements of computer data communications through the same "dial-up" facilities.

There are limitations—very extreme ones in some cases—to the type and format of information which can be transmitted over the dial network. For example, slow-speed data transmission can be accomplished, with relatively few errors, over the dial network, such as two teletypewriters "talking" to each other. High-speed transmission, such as a computer network reservation service, is seldom accomplished as successfully over the dial network. Roughly, the transmission system difficulties are analogous to a radio broadcasting system: Amplitude Modulation (AM) radio has a frequency response limited by ye old FCC to five thousand cycles per second (five kilohertz) and it sounds rather "tinny," especially when compared with the limitations of Frequency Modulation (FM) radio, whose frequency response is limited by the FCC to 15 kilohertz, which is approximately the range of hearing for most adult humans. By contrast, television broadcasting eats up six megahertz for each channel (from two to 83), while your telephone conversations are limited by various local and interstate statutes and telephone company agreements to three kilohertz—about half of the frequency response of AM radio, and about five-hundredths of one percent of that available for television transmission. This frequency response, or bandwidth as it is often called, is the first critical factor in attempting to transmit data over telephone lines.

The second critical factor, and the one which causes the most severe problems, is that data transmission is, at the sending and receiving ends, a digital signal, sensitive only to the absence or presence of a pulse (and, to an extent, the magnitude or amplitude of the pulse), while telephone conversations are analog in nature, being a continuous variation in the frequency of a tone (your voice) and the amplitude of the tone (how loudly you speak). Nearly all data transmission systems using telephone company facilities utilize a device (called a modem) to convert digital pulses to analog waves for transmission over the line and a similar device to convert the analog signal back into digital pulses at the receiving end. Needless to say, significant possibilities for error in transmission are introduced.

These two problems, however severe, are capable of relatively straightforward technical solution. The third one, though, is what is really gumming up the works: when I call you on the telephone, we talk for two or three or perhaps 15 or 20 minutes; when one computer talks to another, they frequently tie up the system (i.e., the particular lines they are using) for stretches which are counted in hours, not minutes. This creates massive problems for a switching system which was designed and built for three-minute calls. The current problems in telephone communications between New York City and Chicago are representative of what can happen when customers decide that they want to transmit daily sales reports between the district office and the corporate headquarters over the dial network. The obvious solution, and one of those which was taken by the common-carriers involved, is to give the computer users lines of their own, charge them the appropriate fees, and let them talk to each other all they want, without messing up the dial network.

All well and good, until the consumers cried "foul" and accused the carriers of discrimination against telephone and computer users, by separating the rates (tariffs) chargeable to each. Coming to the rescue were a few entrepreneurs who decided that there was money to be made in providing computer users with a transmission system which did not (in their eyes) discriminate against the lengthy-transmission user and offered him better rates than could be put forth by the telephone companies. This would have been fine, except that these private concerns sought to use (lease) telephone company facilities to aid in the transmission of their data. Until the "Carterfone decision" (permitting attachment of non-Bell equipment to Bell System lines) by the FCC in 1968, doing so was against the law. But by that time, the entrepreneurs had turned to another transmission medium, called microwave.

Microwave transmission consists essentially of setting up a network of hilltop-to-hilltop radio stations operating at frequencies above that of television channel 83, in portions of the radio spectrum which had been set aside for privately-owned microwave systems. The FCC could, within the statutes available before 1968, grant licenses to these stations without having to deal with the legal monopoly issue. The Commission has proceeded, albeit slowly, to deal with a plethora of such applications, culminating in their landmark decision of 25 May 1971, which ultimately will permit the establishment of nationwide hookups of point-to-point (customer-to-customer) data communications systems without the use of telephone company facilities.

That the facilities are now legal (according to the FCC) is not really a significant fact. The fact that AT&T is a bit disturbed about its loss of revenue is similarly relatively insignificant. The fact that, some day, two-way video transmission over cables (sometimes called two-way cable TV) and a terminal or access device into a computer may be available for every home which now houses a telephone is not overwhelmingly significant either. What does bear watching, listening, monitoring, and evaluation, is that (1) AT&T has come full circle historically and is competing in the sale of (essentially) telegraph lines again, after a major decision to proceed with voice transmission solely, and (2) virtually the entire communications industry is madly producing hardware to attach to these various networks without much regard to the future of communications and the inevitable ROUND FOUR but intent upon selling as many as they can as fast as they can, and (3) the federal government, that great regulator in the sky, seems to be in the business of stamping out fires rather than removing combustible influences—dealing with symptoms as they erupt rather than looking for the causes of these (and forthcoming, to be sure) disputes.

The basic problem lies in the nature of the FCC as a political entity. As such, it seems to respond to technological crises by invoking political and economic restraints—such as encouraging the single-source (monopoly) wire communications system of Ma Bell. Its recent move in favor of more competition more likely represents another pragmatic response to pressure groups than a fundamental change of principle. The Commission has an impossible job; it cannot police the thousands of licensees across the nation to ensure that they remain within the charters granted them. Lacking an overall conceptual framework, it cannot respond rationally to the technological advances which continually outpace and outscope the political and jurisdictional rules and regulations it sets forth.

Michael Bloom is an electrical engineer and sociologist. He is a graduate of the University of California at Santa Barbara.

---

NOTES AND REFERENCES

[1] Chester, Giraud, Garnet R. Garrison, and Edgar E. Willis, TELEVISION AND RADIO, (N.Y.: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1963), pp. 30-31.
[2] Loc.cit.
[3] Loc. cit.
[4] See R.H. Coase, "The Federal Communications Commission," JOURNAL OF LAW & ECONOMICS, Vol. 2 (Oct. 1959), pp. 1 ff.
[5] Nevins, Allan and Henry Steele Commager, A POCKET HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES, (N.Y.: Washington Square Press, 1965), pp. 264-65.

RECOMMENDED:

COMPUTERS AND TELECOMMUNICATIONS ISSUES IN PUBLIC POLICY, Mathison, Stuart L. and Philip M. Walker (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1970).

"Sam Wyly's Gamble—Datran", DATA SYSTEMS NEWS, November 1970, pp. 27ff.

"Data Communications," by Paul Hersch, Associate Editor, IEEE SPECTRUM, February 1971, pp. 47ff.

"The Early Competitive Era In Telephone Communications, 18931920," by Richard Gabel, LAW AND CONTEMPORARY PROBLEMS Vol. 34 No. 2 (Spring 1969), pp. 34059.

"Cream-skimming' Jeopardizes Public Interest: Wiggins," by Ben T. Wiggins, TELEPHONY, 31 October 1970, pp. 48ff.

"A Conversation With H.I. Romnes," Interview by Albin R. Meier, Communications Technology Editor, TELEPHONY, 26 April 1971, pp. 21ff.

"Interconnection Controversy Sparks IEEE meeting," by Albin R. Meier, TELEPHONY, 26 April 1971, pp. 32ff.

"Jerrold Gives You a Look at CatV' IEEE meeting," by Albin R. Meier, TELEPHONY, 26 April 1971, pp. 32ff.

"Jerrold Gives You a Look at CATV's Two-way Future," brochure, Jerrold Electronics Corporation, CATV Systems Division, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, June 1970.