this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2024
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[–] ShittyBeatlesFCPres@lemmy.world 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

And, yet, in that time, consumers paid more for telecommunication services and basically the main innovations they got were touchtone phones replacing rotary ones and higher bills. Bell Labs being a success story doesn’t mean Ma Bell shouldn’t have been broken up.

If consumers are paying extra to a monopoly anyway, just fund university labs and non-university research agencies (which we do). We have dozens of equivalents to Bell Labs. There’s no reason to rely on monopolists for innovation.

[–] JasonDJ@lemmy.zip 1 points 5 months ago

the main innovations they got were touchtone phones replacing rotary ones and higher bills.

That's incredibly incorrect.

Bell labs invented or laid the groundwork for, among other things:

  • Movies with synchronous sound
  • Text-to-speech
  • Stereo broadcasts
  • Radio astronomy
  • The transistor
  • Unix
  • The C programming language
  • The calculator
  • Solar electricity
  • Transatlantic telephone cables
  • LASER
  • Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (this was part of the framework for cell phones. In the 1960s)

Take your anti-research propaganda out of here. Government backed scientists who don't have shareholders holding them accountable are crucial to progress. Capitalism is toxic to scientific progress. Great for improving around existing concepts, terrible for making new ones.