> allowed them to split up (Baby Bells)
That's some pretty baldfaced revisionism you've got going on there.
They were ordered to do this by a court: https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=120938923478579...
That's some pretty baldfaced revisionism you've got going on there.
They were ordered to do this by a court: https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=120938923478579...
In any event, the whole thing went down and was determined long before Reagan took office. The case was filed under the Ford administration and prosecuted mainly by the Carter administration. By the time Reagan took office the case had been in progress for nearly a decade, and he had been president for barely a year when the final decision was handed down.
OP just has so much confused about this chapter of history.
AT&T itself recommended a divestiture structure in which it would be broken up into regional subsidiaries.
Google Scholar
404. That's an error.
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for this URL
That's all we know.These developments, along with an appreciation of new technologies and business models for telephone service that were becoming available, convinced American regulators that AT&T should no longer be tolerated as the natural monopoly in that marketplace.[6] A plan to break up the company into smaller components was proposed by the United States Department of Justice starting in 1974, citing authority under the Sherman Antitrust Act to reduce the power of a monopoly firm.[1] AT&T itself recommended a divestiture structure in which it would be broken up into regional subsidiaries.
Given the context it seems they were fried anyway and were just able to negotiate how the split would be done