nvolved as competitors stormed the walls. By the 1980s court challenges based on the country's antitrust laws were succeeding, and the courts became yet another source of industry regulation that created its own problems. The largest U.S. tele- phone company, AT&T, was broken up under a 1982 federal antitrust decree that held sway for fourteen years, until the administration of this decree became SO cumbersome that Congress was induced to act. The 1996 Telecommunications Act was its way of resolving the disputes that had arisen in enforcing the decree and regulating a balkanized telecommunica- tions sector. From Antitrust to a New Era Competition in U.S. telecommunications actually began much earlier, when the courts forced the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Opening Telecom Markets: The 1996 Telecommunications Act to open the interstate long-distance market in the 1970s.3 It opened the market for customer equipment of its own volition at about the same time. The effect was a series of attacks on AT&T's entrenched position in these two markets by new carriers and by a variety of equipment manufac- turers. This competitive struggle quickly shifted from the marketplace to the courtroom as the principal new long-distance entrant, MCI, and oth- ers alleged that AT&T was engaged in anticompetitive practices in deny- ing entrants access to their customer lines, without which they could not survive. These antitrust suits of the early 1970s reached a crescendo when the government filed its stunning Sherman Act suit against AT&T in 1974.5 After years of legal maneuvering, the case went to trial in 1980. By August 1981, it was clear that the government would win the case at the district court level. As a result, AT&T negotiated a consent agreement in 1982 that required it to divest itself of its local telephone operating com- panies in 1984.6 These operating companies, organized into seven regional Bell holding companies, would be barred from manufacturing telephone equipment, from offering long-distance services, 