[johan_larson]

> We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons, and you call us criminals.

Anyone in the telecommunications industry care to speak to this? Because this guy sounds like a spoiled brat who doesn't realize that good things cost money.

He is talking about the pre-internet landline network, an international communications system that reached virtually everyone in both the biggest cities and the smallest towns, and was so reliable I was nearly twenty before I realized that dial tone wasn't always on if the bill was paid. That wasn't cheap; you needed thousands and thousands of line workers and engineers and administrators and customer service workers to make it all work. And you needed to raise billions of dollars to build the damn thing in the first place.

[heyoni]

I think the point is that the telephone was actually an older invention that was “relatively” cheap to maintain. The fact that it was a ubiquitous and well understood technology, also meant that fees should be lower since it was essentially in maintenance mode. And keep in mind that Bell being split for being a monopoly was likely in the writers mind too.