When the U.S. Department of Justice proved victorious in its historic antitrust suit against AT&T, breaking up what had been the world’s largest corporation in 1984, the feds promised a report every three years to document changes in telecommunications. The first was due in 1987.
But in 1986, with only a year to the deadline, the DOJ was stuck: no team in the U.S. government had the expertise to understand the complexity of this enormous, changing marketplace. A slew of consulting firms was there for hire, but they had all worked for AT&T. So the DOJ gave up on the experts and hired one man who had never studied the communications sector.
Peter Huber had no conflicts and started from scratch. The Geodesic Network: 1987 Report on Competition in the Telephone Industry, later cited widely as “the massive Huber report,” became a runaway bestseller for the Government Printing Office. The report brilliantly detailed how technologies of freedom were primed to crush old monopolies with disruptions at the network’s “edge”—personal computers, software, devices—if policymakers would lean back. The 450-page, data-dense thesis was delivered to the DOJ in 11 months; weeks early, as that was all the time Huber needed to go from zero to the world’s leading authority on perhaps the most complicated public policy issue yet invented.
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