gulation, but in return, it would use the government's
regulators as its own police, who would keep out competitors and assure
the Bell system's profits and preeminence.

This was the second birth--the political birth--of the American
telephone system. Vail's arrangement was to persist, with vast
success, for many decades, until 1982. His system was an odd kind of
American industrial socialism. It was born at about the same time as
Leninist Communism, and it lasted almost as long--and, it must be
admitted, to considerably better effect.

Vail's system worked. Except perhaps for aerospace, there has been no
technology more thoroughly dominated by Americans than the telephone.
The telephone was seen from the beginning as a quintessentially
American technology. Bell's policy, and the policy of Theodore Vail,
was a profoundly democratic policy of UNIVERSAL ACCESS. Vail's famous
corporate slogan, "One Policy, One System, Universal Service," was a
political slogan, with a very American ring to it.

The American telephone was not to become the specialized tool of
government or business, but a general public utility. At first, it was
true, only the wealthy could afford private telephones, and Bell's
company pursued the business markets primarily. The American phone
system was a capitalist effort, meant to make money; it was not a
charity. But from the first, almost all communities with telephone
service had public telephones. And many stores--especially
drugstores--offered public use of their phones. You might not own a
telephone--but you could always get into the system, if you really
needed to.

There was nothing inevitable about this decision to make telephones
"public" and "universal." Vail's system involved a profound act of
trust in the public. This decision was a political one, informed by
the basic values of the American republic. The situation might have
been very different; and in other countries, under other systems, it
certainly was.

Joseph Stalin, for instance, vetoed plans for a Soviet phone system
soon after the Bolshevik revolution. Stalin was certain that publicly
accessible telephones would become instruments of anti-Soviet
counterrevolution and conspiracy. (He was probably right.) When
telephones did arrive in the Soviet Union, they would be instruments of
Party authority, and always heavily tapped. (Alexander Solzhenitsyn's
prison-camp novel The First Circle describes efforts to dev