The good monopoly

I have a confession to make: I've never played an entire game of Monopoly. Somewhere along the way, either I got bored or my playing companions did. We would either leave the game in place, planning to come back (but never doing so), or concede victory to the player racking up hotels and extorting the highest rents from the rest of us. As a parent, I packed away my fair share of unfinished Monopoly games as well, so this is either a genetic defect or a common occurrence.

Other than the game, however, there are few kind things to be said about monopolies. We associate them with arrogance, unfair treatment of consumers and outrageous prices. So when industry consolidation led to quips by analysts and late-night comedians alike about the reassembly of the AT&T monopoly, the underlying thought was that this was not a good thing.

There still are, in fact, some people who think that breaking up Ma Bell only generated chaos, confusion and 10-digit telephone numbers. These are the same folks who forget how carefully we counted long-distance minutes as we sat using those attractive black phones that the phone company had leased to us.

As Joni Mitchell once said, however, something's lost and something's gained in living every day, and in this case, one thing that may have been lost with the close of the monopoly era was the venerable scientific research institution that was Bell Labs.

As my colleague Kevin Fitchard details in this issue, the end of the AT&T monopoly inevitably led to changes that, by necessity, ended some of the less-commercial scientific research within the massive building in Murray Hill, N.J., that once produced the transistor, much of modern fiber optics, communications satellites, cellular technology and more.

The telecom industry is still coming to grips with the lack of a centralized, neutral research facility. Its primary competitor — the cable industry — has just such an entity in Cable Labs, and that organization has helped channel resources for every major technology shift and service improvement that cable has made since Cable Labs' inception.

Telecom standards today are more fragmented and influenced by a wide range of international and national standards groups, not to mention forums and user groups. In fact, no new technology is generally accepted as viable until it has its own forum and, in many cases, competing groups.

This approach has stymied many major changes, as new technology initiatives are co-opted, diluted or produced in multiple, irreconcilable versions by commercial entities protecting their own interests and agendas.

It happened most recently to IP multimedia subsystem, but the same patterns have influenced deployment, or lack thereof, of ATM and early wireless data options.

In a competitive market, it seems unlikely that any of that will change — which makes even a Monopoly-hater like me long just a little bit for the old days.