 the Frontier name, to rural LEC chain Citizens Communications. For a short time during the boom, Qwest looked like a clear winner. By purchasing US West, albeit the smallest and weakest of the RBOCs, Qwest had purchased a cash engine; even a weak ILEC has monopoly power and thus gen- erates consistent profits. In essence it had monetized the speculative value of its stock. This proved to be very useful going forward, as increasing competition and the failure of the Internet sector led to major losses in the long distance arena. That did not, however, save Qwest when in 2001 it was found to have engaged in creative accounting practices. These practices included swapping assets with other carriers and recording them as sales (hollow swaps) and improperly accounting for IRUs. Qwest restated its sales downward by about $2 billion in 2002. Its partners in crime, Global Crossing and Enron, were also brought down by financial scandal. Qwest did emerge under new leadership and remained a major player, but its original investors were severely harmed along the way. Kiewit Sells MFS, Creates Level 3 MFS Communications, originally Metropolitan Fiber Systems, was founded in the late 1980s and had gone public in 1993, just as the Internet was itself becoming available to the public. Its primary owner was Peter Kiewit Sons', the Omaha-based construction giant. In 1995, MFS acquired UUNET, the largest backbone Internet service provider. In 1996, WorldCom paid $14.3 billion to acquire MFS. Having struck gold in telecom once, Kiewit promptly set out to do it again. Its subsidiary, Kiewit Diversified Group, began creating a long-haul net- work operation and was later renamed Level 3 Communications [3]. Its mission was to build a nationwide fiber-optic network oriented toward Internet Protocol rather than focused on the declining revenue area of traditional telephony. This not only avoided association with a sector that was already distressed, but it asso- ciated the start-up with the boom, making it, in effect, a large, self-provi