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Comment by dpe82 | Hacker News Reader

That's a distinction without a difference; the consent agreements and cases arose as a result of antitrust regulations.

What has changed since then are the legal theories of when and how to apply antitrust regulations. The law as written has not changed, but the way it's enforced (or not) certainly has.

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The consent agreements are agreements between the government and AT&T. They arose because neither side wanted to find out if AT&T was breaking antitrust law. So that the consent agreements and cases arose as a result of antitrust regulations is true. But when you say "the legal theories of when and how to apply antitrust regulations" has changed, that is not supported by the consent agreement because those agreements are not enforcements of antitrust regulations. Similarly when you say "the law as written has not changed, but the way it's enforced" has, that is also not correct in this case because the consent agreements/settlements are not enforcements of laws. I suppose you can argue that if the AT&T case happened today that AT&T would be more likely not to settle because they would feel that they are more likely to win because legal theories have changed. That is in any event it is a different matter than your claim about the enforcement of antitrust laws which did not occur in the case of AT&T. Also note that Kodak was decided in 1992 and is still considered good law. In that case the court found that Kodak was in violation of antitrust law. And that case is still essentially the basis for most (all?) antitrust cases that have been brought to court since then. For example the recent Epic vs. Apple case was just about how to define the foremarket and aftermarket for the variously tied products in the iPhone (like Appstores and operating systems). Nobody has argued that Kodak itself is invalid due to a change in legal theory. You may see a difference in that the government sued a large company in the past but hasn't done so recently and I think that is true. But your claim that it is due to a change in legal theory or enforcement of law is not necessarily true. None of the large tech companies today are nearly as dominant in their markets as AT&T was. The company which most closely resembles AT&T in market control is probably Google in ads but even then it's not even close to what AT&T was doing which was complete control over all US telephone lines and on the phones themselves with explicit contractual agreements that you could not try to make your own phone and use their existing network. I imagine that would violate the law that came out of Kodak by a large margin and had AT&T existed in the same way today it would certainly be sued by the US government and lose.

> So that the consent agreements and cases arose as a result of antitrust regulations is true. But when you say "the legal theories of when and how to apply antitrust regulations" has changed, that is not supported by the consent agreement because those agreements are not enforcements of antitrust regulations.

You seem to be implying complete independence between something being the results of antitrust regulations, the results of the enforcement of antitrust regulations, or the consequences of theories of how when to enforce antitrust regulations. For people who speculate that these three things might be related to each other, your argument will not work.

It was the result of antitrust regulations only inasmuch as it caused the government to begin legal proceedings against AT&T. It isn't the result of antitrust regulations in the legal sense, just the result of those antitrust regulations existing because had they not existed then there would be no case against AT&T and therefore no settlement. But those results were not an instance of antitrust regulation legally occurring. Certainly not within the sense I initially referred to it which was a regulation such that it could still be used today ("I thought GGP was referring to a real regulation that was later removed"). We can call the AT&T case a "one time regulation" in that it is not a law but was still carried out by the government even if technically optionally accepted by AT&T. But this is certainly different from a "real" regulation which is a written rule that takes affect every time the conditions of the rule are met, which was not the case in AT&T.

Thank you for taking the time to write such a long and informative reply. I found it enlightening.

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