With the move to buy BellSouth and the portion of Cingular, the entity formerly known as Ma Bell is back in business. All of this follows the recent acquisition of what was left of AT&T by SBC after a decade of TCA follies that ultimately led to SBC renaming itself AT&T.

Naturally, you can't help but wonder if this was all some cynical effort on the part of Congress, the Justice Department, the courts and Wall Street to essentially get rich by first taking a conglomerate apart and then getting paid to rebuild the very same entity.

Alas, the truth of the matter is that this farcical tale was born first from supercilious legislation wrangled out of various committees that ultimately was defanged by courts that rightly concluded that the core tenet of the legislation, which required incumbent carriers to sell broadband services to rival startups at a loss, was essentially illegal.

With that decision in place, the whole rationale for CLECs disappeared and with it any logical reason for artificially trying to prop up various regional monopolies.

Read the rest of Michael Vizard's entry here.

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