#AJVerdelle: “My high school job was French fries, but once in college, at the #UniversityOfChicago, I got my first amazing library job. At the beautiful and august Harper Library, deep in the interior of the U of C quad, I started working in the stacks and at the library desk, and I met the me I would become: A book person”

@bookstodon

@eludom The initial thread scope was Doctorow's discussion of monopoly harms, and especially Robert Bork and Aaron Director's whole-cloth invention of "consumer value" as the sole concern of anti-trust policy, which is an utter fabrication, that's become the operative model in the US, and elsewhere, thanks specifically to their project to instill this myth.

AT&T operated under anti-trust and consent-decree investigations and limitations since 1913 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_AT%26T#Monopoly). The development of UNIX by Ritchie & Thompson occurred under terms of a 1956 consent decree forbidding the company from taking part in the "computer systems" (devices, software, operating systems) market. The options were to shelve to project ... or give it away. "From Ken, with love" tapes of the system were not directly supported by corporate policy, but weren't forbidden either. A grey no-property zone.

By 1980, the final stages of the US v. AT&T case, filed in 1974, were clear. The company would be broken up 4 years later, its monopoly was largely broken, and the Unix Wars and BSD lawsuit began, with the unencumbered from-scratch alternative Linux gaining a critical foothold: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_wars

Since then, the Baby Bells have re-merged and the monopoly resurrected, though in different form and in a different telecoms and computing environment.

#AT&T #antitrust #monopoly #unix #bsd #UnixWars #linux #RobertBork #AaronDirector #UniversityOfChicago