I recall Greene, the judge who presided over that, saying he was kind of sorry that he did it because now phone service really sucked. Fun fact, the story I was told by some old timers during my tenure with Ma was: The government tried to break up the bell system multiple times before, but Ma was so good at paperwork that when it was requested, she would literally load up trains full of it and send it to the government. It was near impossible for anything to be done because there was so much paper. However, Ma wanted to get into computers and data processing. Beyond computers for her own use, she couldn't sell them to the general populace due to agreements. So this time, she let herself be broken up into the 7 RBOCs which have, for the most part, recombined - all so the agreements not to enter data processing would be nullified. Her foray into computers went nowhere - PC compatibles were a overpriced shit-tier offering sourced from Olivetti, The BellMAC and Hobbit processors never saw much use outside of the bell system because Ma had the marketing genius of a grapefruit, and the 3B20 series made of homegrown parts barely made it out into the real world. Computing was quietly dropped. UNIX remains the Bell System's only real contribution to general purpose computing.