Ten Years Ago... Whitacre Carves Out SBC Empire

Disdaining Regulators, Whitacre Carves Out SBC Empire
[SOURCE: New York Times 7/21/1997, AUTHOR: Mark Landler]
After hearing an appeals court in St. Louis had just thrown out the Federal Communications Commission's rules governing competition in the local phone market, SBC Communications Chairman Edward E. Whitacre Jr. smiled and said, It is good. "Our stockholders own the local phone network -- lock, stock, and barrel," Mr. Whitacre said. "Now here comes the FCC, saying, 'we'll let everybody else lease that network at a 70 percent discount.' They expect us to tank our stockholders. No way." Talk like that made Whitacre a lightning rod in the debate about why competition was been so slow in coming to telephone service in the wake of the Telecom Act of 1996.
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