Brand X: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

As George Santayana rightly said, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

In 1905 Santayana cautioned humanity not to forget past mistakes. Though spoken in another era, today's Supreme Court decision is a good case in point. In the first decade of the 1900s, the newest cutting-edge communications medium was the telephone. In the early 20th century, hundreds of communities developed their own phone exchanges, building their own networks, deploying their own systems, and implementing their own solutions. This "Home-Rule" movement wasn't a fringe -- at its height, roughly 40% of all phones in the United States were owned by Home-Rule groups.

Unfortunately, the Bell/AT&T corporation set out to crush these low-cost, community-owned competitors. It did this by refusing long-distance interconnection between Home-Rule communities. The result being that these Home-Rule systems floundered, unable to connect to the outside world, Bell/AT&T used its long-distance monopoly to force consumers to buy local services from them alone and abandon their lower cost networks. In the end, it took 75 years before AT&T was found in direct violation of anti-trust laws -- 75 years where consumer prices were kept artificially high, where innovation was stifled, and where our choices were severely limited by a corporation who put profit margins before the public good. And during most of this 75-year history, AT&T's profits were capped at roughly 7.5% -- which meant that the worst excesses were at least kept (somewhat) in check.

And today, the Supreme Court condemned US consumers to a new era of unjust, unreasonable, substandard, overpriced telecommunications services. By overturning the federal court decision requiring sharing of Internet backbones by telecom incumbents, the Supreme Court (led by Clarence Thomas) has all but guaranteed a new wave a anti-competitive legislation (at both the state and national levels) that will limit and/or eliminate interconnection of local Internet Service Providers. The result will be a historical parallel -- it will be a travesty for consumers; and the profit cap that used to exist -- that went the way of most consumer protections post-1984.

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