Apple's new iPhone augurs the inevitable return of the Bell telephone monopoly.

iSurrender Apple's new iPhone augurs the inevitable return of the Bell telephone monopoly.

By Tim Wu Slate Magazine Posted Tuesday, June 10, 2008, at 3:13 PM ET

If my iPhone were a motorcycle, she'd be a chopper. I'm the owner of an unlocked, jail-broken iPhone 1.3 that runs on the T-Mobile network, fortified with third-party apps (like Tap Tap Revolution), adorned with Death Star wall paper, and running a natty customized interface named "Manhattan." Sure, not everything works perfectly (recently, the clock went off by an hour or so, for no apparent reason). But that's part of the fun of iPhone-modding, a vibrant scene that resembles the Apple II culture of the 1980s.

Unfortunately, for me at least, it may all be coming to an end. After Monday's iPhone 2.0 debut, it's just a matter of time before I trade in my chopper phone for Apple's new 3G phone-and swallow that AT&T contract.

That may sound like trading a dune buggy for a Toyota Corolla. But like most such decisions, there is a depressing inevitability to the whole thing. As an ever-uncooler Steve Jobs (clad in atrocious jeans) made clear on Monday, the new iPhone pounds the hell out of the old one. Apple has rigged the thing with a better battery, GPS capabilities, and, most importantly, download speeds faster than the rate at which a man passes a kidney stone (at least if you live in a city, as David Pogue points out). I'm nostalgic but I'm not stupid-the new phone will be too handy not to have. But as Jobs neglected to mention, getting your hands on a new iPhone will mean signing, at the moment of purchase, a two-year AT&T contract. Tough news for the free iPhone movement.

The fact that someone like me is switching to AT&T is a sign of the times in the telephone world. The wireless industry was once and is still sometimes called a "poster child for competition." That kind of talk needs to end. Today, the industry is more like an old divorced couple; the bickering spouses are AT&T and Verizon, the two halves of the old Bell empire. (To its credit, the Bell company, in internal memos, proposed a wireless phone in 1915 and then spent 70 or so years deciding how to deploy it without hurting its wired-phone business.) While you can't blame this on the iPhone, nearly every non-Bell phone company is, in the long tradition of such firms, dying or being purchased. Sprint Nextel lost an astonishing $29.5 billion in a single quarter last year-a loss of nearly double the annual revenue of Google. Alltel, one of the last independents, is being bought by Verizon. The exception is T-Mobile, which, while healthy, simply doesn't have the spectrum to play with the bigs. By the end of this year, we may find that the wireless world, in industry structure at least, will be pretty close to where it was at the beginning of the 1990s, before "deregulation."

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To me, that automated change to DST was bad planning and design. Every automatic function should have a manual backup.

Let's remember that the dates of DST have changed several times over the years, well before today's automated devices came along. I think one change was from the last Sunday in April to the first Sunday. But even before that there were other changes years back (the point being the date was never fixed in stone and shouldn't have been hard coded). In addition, there were (are?) areas that don't observe DST.

My VCR and Windows 95 handled this intelligently. They had an _optional_ automatic change which was very easy to turn off.

When the DST date change not long ago, everyone was worried about computer clock control. This was, IMHO, a disgrace. Computers and communications have long run 24 hour schedules and managed to deal with DST for many years, even if it meant the night shift operator retyping the time of day manually.

I wonder how the old Bell System's eletro-mechanical AMA, indeed operator calugraphs, handled DST changes for calls in progress at 2 a.m. Obviously they did. When time advanced to 3 a.m., I don't think they charged a customer 65 minutes for a 5 minute call, and when the time retarded to 1 a.m. I don't think they ignored calls with a negative time value (or worse, charged a call for 25 hours of talk time!). Whatever they did, they managed to work it out.