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After Nine, Keep It Short: Who Paid for the Call Home cover art

After Nine, Keep It Short: Who Paid for the Call Home

After Nine, Keep It Short: Who Paid for the Call Home

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 Wait till after nine. Keep it short, this is long distance. From the mid-1950s to 1984, calling home across the country had its own rulebook: station-to-station or person-to-person, the three-minute minimum, the operator premium and the night-and-Sunday rate clock. June and Nate rebuild that rulebook and the prices on it, using a 1963 newspaper rate notice and a secondhand 1980 rate table, and they're honest about the numbers the archive doesn't have. Then they open up the formula underneath. It started with a 1930 Supreme Court case, got steeper with the 1970 Ozark Plan, and loaded a growing share of local phone line costs onto long-distance calls. When the Bell System broke up, the prices flipped. Was it a fair bargain that kept the dial tone cheap for everyone, or a hidden tax on the families split by distance? People still argue about it. The episode ends with Ask Them This: three questions to take to someone who was twenty then. Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operator_assistance https://ask.metafilter.com/211826/Long-Distance-Rates-For-the-Late-Seventies-and-Early-Eighties https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/dec/coh-phone.html https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F2/631/1059/86728/ https://www.justice.gov/osg/brief/national-association-state-utility-v-fcc-opposition https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F2/787/1421/197770/ https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/us-dc-circuit/2190543.html https://www.encyclopedia.com/books/politics-and-business-magazines/mci-communications-corporation https://www.tlp.law/2024/06/13/fcc-announces-proposed-q3-2024-usf-contribution-factor/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System https://www.upi.com/Archives/1985/12/10/Local-phone-bills-up-35-percent-since-1983/1039503038800/ https://www.cato.org/regulation/fall-2012/what-happens-when-local-phone-service-deregulated https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1992-01-07-fi-1725-story.html https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/usf_50_anniversary/37/ https://classic.esquire.com/article/1971/10/1/secrets-of-the-blue-box
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