telephones caught in between

During the heyday of AT&T, it was often said that the telephone system was the largest machine ever built. The "hello machine" certainly was vast, but whether or not you consider it to be a single machine raises challenging questions of definition. The Internet, I think we can all agree, is not a single machine but a system of interconnected ones. The telephone network, though, felt a lot more like one device. "One Policy, One System, Universal Service" was once the slogan of AT&T, a message that the telephone network is more than just a sum of parts. The third of these principles, "Universal Service," is a key point around which telecom policy pivots even today. As the telephone system was at its apex, Universal Service became its undoing. We know the Internet to be a network of independent devices in part because of the wide variety of ways that we access it. Computer networks, almost to their origin, have emphasized independent implementations of standardized interfaces. Computers,…