The Gigi and the GOAT: From Breaking Up AT&T to Harnessing AI

In a fireside chat at the Benton Institute for Broadband and Society’s March 5 event, “Telecom Act at 30”, Benton Senior Fellow and Public Advocate Gigi Sohn spoke with former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Phil Verveer, who served as lead counsel in United States v. AT&T, the case that led to the breakup of AT&T, about the structural preconditions that led to the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Sohn began by asking Ambassador Verveer how the AT&T case shaped his understanding of what the 1996 Act sought to accomplish. “I think it's clear,” Ambassador Verveer said, “that the '96 Act was necessitated, in a sense, by the unsustainability of what had fallen out of the AT&T settlement and the divestiture.”