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Once having divested itself of the local operating companies, where most of its investment is concentrated, AT&T will be able to surge ahead with more and more new products and services without fear of being stopped by Government regulation. Says former Federal Communications Commission Chairman Richard Wiley, who presided over the regulation of AT&T's interstate activities during the mid-1970s: "The settlement was a brilliant master stroke on the company's part. AT&T gave away the future railroads of the telephone industry, kept the moneymakers that the firm already had, and won the right to go after everything else on the high-revenue side."
Yet as consumers, politicians and businessmen paused to take a good look at the AT&T settlement, they found that they had far more questions about it than there were answers. Among the first concerns was that the breakup might unleash an explosion in telephone costs. In Washington, Colorado Democrat Timothy Wirth, chairman of the House
Subcommittee on Telecommunications, warned of "sharp increases" in the charges for local telephone service and promised hearings to assess the full impact of the settlement. Among those planning to testify before Wirth's committee are AT&T Chairman Charles L. Brown and Assistant Attorney General William Baxter, the two men who negotiated the agreement. The Senate Commerce Committee has also announced plans to hold hearings that will look into the historic settlement.
Meanwhile, Federal District Court Judge Harold Greene, who has presided since 1978 over the Justice Department's suit against AT&T, became concerned that the deal had been reached without full consideration of all the issues and implications involved. To give consumer groups, corporate competitors and others an opportunity to file their opinions in the matter, he ordered a 60-day delay before making a formal decision on the arrangement.
Though AT&T has six months to draft a specific plan of divestiture and twelve months more to put it into effect, the company is so complex and sprawling that the entire process could easily drag on for years. Scores of million-dollar questions await answers. Among them are such basic issues as whether AT&T or the divested local operating companies will wind up owning the more than 142.5 million telephones that Americans now lease from the Bell System. Most likely, ownership of the phones will not be passed on to the local operating companies. Likewise unresolved is the question of whether telephone users in the future will continue to get one monthly bill that itemizes both local and long-distance charges on a single statement or separate bills for both. One bill is likely.