31, 2003 (June 2004), table 1. a. Total lines for 1984 and 1994 are not strictly comparable with data for later years. suffered a decline of 16 percent in their end-user lines between the end of 1999 and 2003. Bell Company Equity Values Since 1996 the large Bell company incumbents have seen their equity val- ues rise and fall with the general stock market (figure 5-1). They under- performed the S&P 500 in early 2000 in response to an adverse Supreme Court ruling that affirmed the Federal Communications Commission's (FCC's) right to establish pricing rules for unbundled elements, but they rebounded in late 2000 and 2001.3 In the spring of 2002, they began to lag behind the S&P 500 once again in the wake of additional adverse legal rul- ings concerning broadband regulation and evidence that local wireline ser- vices were losing traffic to wireless operators. In February 2003, the FCC's adverse ruling on UNE-Ps drove Bell company equities down, and though it was reversed by the U.S. Court of Appeals early the next year, Bell com- pany stocks had still not recovered by the end of June 2004. Nevertheless, of the U.S. telecom carriers, the Bell companies have been the least affected by the telecom bubble and the subsequent meltdown that began in 2000. 4 The reasons for this result are to be found in the post-1984 regulatory his- tory of the telecommunications industry. When divested from AT&T in 1984, the Bell operating companies were sequestered in the local-exchange business by the AT&T antitrust decree. Effect of the 1996 Act on Incumbent Local Companies Figure 5-1. RBOC Equities versus Standard & Poor's 500 Index, February 1996 = 100 RBOCs S&P 500 Source: Author's calculation from data obtained from www.finance.yahoo.com. a. RBOCs in this index are Bell South, SBC, and Verizon only. US West was acquired by Qwest, a long-distance company, in 2000. For twelve years, they attempted to gain entry into the more dynamic parts of the telecommunications business, with only modest success. 5 Indeed, the 1996 act was largely