The Enduring Lessons of the Breakup of AT&T: A Twenty-Five Year Retrospective

Abstract:     
On April 18-19, 2008, the University of Pennsylvania Law School hosted a landmark conference on The Enduring Lessons of the Breakup of AT&T: A Twenty-Five Year Retrospective. This conference was the first major event for Penn's newly established Center for Technology, Innovation, and Competition, a research institute committed to promoting basic research into foundational frameworks that will shape the way policymakers think about technology-related issues in the future.

The breakup of AT&T represents an ideal starting point for reexamining the major themes of telecommunications policy that have emerged over the past quarter century. The conference featured a keynote address by the Hon. Richard A. Posner of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit, who reflected on the little-known role he played in the litigation. Panels addressed the following topics:

- Looking Back at Divestiture: What Worked? What Didn't? (Roger Noll, Paul MacAvoy, Alfred Kahn, Joseph Weber)
- Equal Access as the New Regulatory Paradigm: The Transition from Rate Regulation to Access Regulation (Glen Robinson, Tim Wu, Christopher Yoo, Gerald Faulhaber)
- Structural Separation in Dynamic Markets: Lessons for the Internet, Lessons for Europe (Joseph Farrell, Eli Noam, Michael Riordan, Michael Salinger)
- From the MFJ to Trinko: The Essential Facilities Doctrine and the Proper Provinces of Antitrust and Regulation (Daniel Spulber, Michael Katz, Timothy Brennan, Howard Shelanski)
- Regulation by Consent Decree: Lessons for Microsoft and Beyond (Richard Epstein, Robert Crandall, Daniel Rubinfeld, Philip Weiser)
- The Future of Intercarrier Compensation (Gerald Brock, Simon Wilkie, James Speta, Kevin Werbach)

Selected papers were published in the Federal Communications Law Journal.

Number of Pages in PDF File: 11

Keywords: antitrust, telecommunications, Modification of Final Judgment, divestiture, equal access, Trinko, structural separation, consent decree, intercarrier compensation

JEL Classification: K21, K23, L96

Accepted Paper Series