later. These services were born serving content of their own. They were not
Internet portals. There was indeed no way to move from their proprietary
system to the nonproprietary Internet.

By the mid-1990s, all this changed as the attraction of the Internet grew,
and as the competitive threat of ISPs increased. As more and more saw the
Internet as an attractive alternative to the edited content of the existing ser-
vice providers, they pressed their service providers to provide access to the
Internet.

As I've suggested, the part of this story that is too often missed is the role
that the telephone company played in the birth of the Net or, more accu-
rately, the role the telephone company did not play. For what is striking
about the birth of this different mode of communication is how little the
telephone companies did in response. As their wires were being used for this
new and different purpose, they did not balk. They instead stood by as the
Internet was served across their wires.

This was no slight change. When telephones are used for talking, the av-
erage usage at a particular house is quite small. Calls are ordinarily short, so
the number of circuits needed in a particular region is few.

But when phones began to be used to link to the Internet, this usage
changed dramatically. Calls no longer lasted a few minutes on average. Peo-
ple were dialing in and hanging on, and the burden placed on the tele-
phone system was great. The average voice call typically lasts only three to
five minutes; the average Internet "call" lasts seventeen to twenty minutes.[10-1]

Ordinarily, one imagines that telephone companies would be quick to re-
spond to this change in usage. They would either be quick to increase rates
for calls over a certain length or they might restrict usage to certain kinds of
telephone numbers (such as those to the ISPs). And we might imagine that
telephone companies, if they were creative, would decide to become their
own Internet service providers, offering better rates internally than they did
to other Internet service providers. In short, there are any number of games
telephone companies might play to respond to this demand for Internet ser-
vices.

Phone companies, however, did not play these games, because they were
not allowed to. And they were not allowed to because regulators stopped
them.[10-2]

As we saw in Chapter 3, the telephone company had become a disfavored
monopoly. Its power over its wires had first been limited in 1968, in the
_Carterfone_ decision,[10-3] and then after growing resistance by Congress and the
FCC, most dramatically by the Justice Department in the early 1980s. In

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