We’d have better technologies. Instead of trailing Europe and Asia as we do now we’d be selling them our old systems like we did before AT&T was broken up.
Well, I used to work for them, post breakup.
Funny story: MaBell wanted to sell modems. Thing was, Hayes set the standard and MaBell still had the attitude that since they invented the modem in the first place, they didn’t have to use the Hayes command set.
Wanna guess how well that worked out?
We used USR modems at The Labs.
How about the picture phone? They struggled with that for years. Now I can pull a 3x6 device out of my pocket and FaceTime to another device anywhere in the world, from anywhere in the world.
Sure, maybe they would have gotten there, but was the incentive for them to do it, there?
I only wish we hadn’t lost the Labs, first to Lucent, then Alcatel, and now to Nokia. But that wasn’t government’s doing. We did that all on our own.
Competition has been good.
Do you really believe that? If we're trailing Europe and Asia, it's because they caught up to the U.S. after the post-WW2 period when we were the only major industrial power in the world. Nothing we do with the corporate structures we have here in the U.S. is ever going to change that.