1984, a decree breaking up AT&T was entered, and over the next ten years,
Congress and the FCC struggled to find a model under which the Bells cre-
ated by the breakup would be regulated.

The model finally fixed upon -- and ratified by a statute of Congress in
1996 -- imposed an obligation on the Baby Bells to be neutral about how
their lines would be used. The Baby Bells were required to unbundle the
services they offered and make it possible for others to compete directly with
them. If you wanted to start an ISP, you could connect your service into the
telephone company's office. Their wires in a sense became your wires. The
important point was preserving and defending neutrality.[10-4]

This imposed neutrality had an unintended effect on the Internet and its
growth, because while the regulators imagined creating competition in the
telephone service, they did not have in their head the idea that this might
create a kind of competition _with_ telephone service. They did not imagine
the birth of the Internet as a product of their accidental regulation. But that
is precisely what their regulation produced. This imposed neutrality about
how the wires would be used left the field open for others to use the wires in
ways no one ever expected. The Internet was one such way.

/tab\/tab\THE END-TO-END IN TELEPHONES/tab\/tab\

As I described in Chapter 3, the end-to-end argument says intelligence in a
network should be located at the edge, or ends, of the network, and that the
network itself should remain simple. Only those functions that must be
placed in the network are placed in the network. Other functions -- other
intelligence -- are left to the applications that run on the network.

The TCP/IP Internet was designed as an end-to-end network. The proto-
cols of TCP/IP simply enable data to be sent across the network. They regu-
late how data is to be divided and how the resulting packets are shipped.
They don't at all care about what is built into the data or how that built-in
part works.

Not all networks are end-to-end in this sense. A contrasting network de-
sign is, for example, an asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) design. Under
the ATM design, the network first establishes a virtual circuit between two
endpoints in the network; it then ships data along that circuit. The virtual
circuit means the network can control quality of service. But the virtual cir-
cuit also means the network is more "intelligent" than another network.[10-5]
The circuit could be programmed to be compliant with the end-to-end

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