The history of the telephone is also the history of antitrust law, semiconductor physics, and the geographic accident that became Silicon Valley. This piece traces how regulatory pressure on Bell System monopolies directly seeded the conditions for independent innovation, forcing proprietary research into the public domain and scattering engineers who built the next era of computing.
The argument worth reading is not the conclusion but the mechanics: how Moore's Law functioned as both a roadmap and a ceiling, and how the industry's response to approaching that ceiling echoes the same consolidation patterns that regulators broke apart a generation earlier. Specific inflection points, names, and policy decisions are laid out with enough precision to make the pattern legible.
If the semiconductor industry is hitting physical limits while simultaneously reconcentrating into a handful of dominant players, the regulatory history here is not background, it is the forecast. Read the full piece for the through-line.
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