From the outset, big business objected to the fact that socially-determined telephone rates compelled corporations to foot the bill for the practice of cross subsidization. Determined to reshape the industry to meet its needs and to reduce its communications costs, big business mounted elaborate, well financed campaigns in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s to convince governments and regulators to deregulate the telephone industry. So, in a forerunner of the process that has since become known as globalization, the corporate sectors of the United States, Britain and Japan successfully pressured their respective governments to abandon social oversight of their telecommunications industries and to allow competition in the highly profitable long distance part of the business. As a consequence of a the deluge of policy and regulatory changes which ensued in those countries and elsewhere, the social regulation which guided telecommunications for the first eighty years of the century was dismantled. Today the Information Highway is being promoted as the cure for a range of social and economic ills.
Access is acknowledged as the key to maximizing the technology's positive social potential.
In 1993, copies of a document called Ameritech Update circulated in the ranks of Canada's telephone company executives. This document, which has been followed closely by Canada's telephone companies, was a corporate blueprint for reshaping the industry in a deregulated environment. The introduction of Local Measured Service. A series of unprecedented local rate increases has resulted. Ameritech planned to target this market with sales promotions for second lines, voice mailboxes, and other lucrative central office features.