be regulated and, therefore, tightly controlled. Enhanced services, including CPE, would be deregulated and made completely competitive. AT&T was told that it could sell enhanced services but only through fully separate sub- sidiaries, to ensure no mixing of revenues between the two sides of the business. In 1981, the United States U. AT&T came to trial in Judge Harold Greene's court. In the months that followed it became painfully clear to AT&T that it would not win this game. On January 8, 1982, the two sides announced that they had reached a mutually acceptable agreement. The agreement, known as the Modified Final Judgment, stipulated that AT&T would divest itself of its 22 local telephone companies, the Bell Operating Companies. The company would retain ownership of Western Electric, Bell Laboratories, and AT&T Long Lines and would be allowed to enter noncarrier lines of business such as computers and the like. Meanwhile, the BOCs were gathered into seven regional BOCs called RBOCs, tasked with providing local service to the regions they served. The RBOCs were further subdivided into Local Access and Transport Areas, or LATAs, which defined the areas within which they were allowed to provide transport. A state like California, for example, is very large; so, even though the traffic between San Francisco and San Diego never leaves Pacific Bell territory, it clearly travels over a long distance and therefore must be handed off to a long-distance carrier for transport between LATAs. While the best-known impact of divestiture was the breakup of AT&T -one result of which was the liberalization of the telecommunications marketplace in the United States-a second decision that was tightly intertwined with the Bell System's breakup was largely invisible to the public, yet was at least as important to AT&T competitors MCI and Sprint as the breakup itself. This decision, known as Equal Access, had one seminal goal: to make it possible for end customers to take advan- tage of one of the products of divestiture, the abili