Imagine the following: A skilled entrepreneur sees his business ruined after the secrets of his success - the identities and habits of his suppliers and customers, friends and associates - are plucked from his phone records and marketed to a competitor.
Or consider the surprise of making a call to an auto repair shop only for the phone company, which keeps track of whom you call and when, sell that fact to local car dealers, who in turn hound you with their hard sell.Worse yet, you make an innocent call to a marriage counselor. Tipped off by information purchased from the phone company, a divorce lawyer shows up on your doorstep the next morning.
Impossible? Not at all. A vision of the future? Perhaps.
After almost a decade of court-ordered deregulation and reregulation, we have been propelled to a critical crossroads in shaping the future of the telecommunications industry in America.
The level playing field that was to have been guaranteed by restrictions on the seven regional Bell operating companies after their birth in the breakup of AT&T has undergone a seismic shift.
And if Congress does not act soon to mitigate what the courts have done, freedom of choice, fair play and even our right to privacy will be at risk.
In October, the U.S. Court of Appeals cleared the way for the seven Bell companies to begin offering a wide range of electronic services beyond the "plain old telephone service" in their $80 billion-a-year business.
Ownership of the only available distribution lines in their regions, their unique access to valuable information about their competitors and consumers and their enormous financial resources give the Bell companies a tremendous edge.
Without reasonable checks, these same conglomerates that have used their market power to forestall competition and overcharge consumers for basic telephone service will be in a position to decide the terms and conditions under which electronic information services become available to the public.
This is not an issue of freedom for the Bells, but fairness in the marketplace.
As providers of information services like electronic publishing, stock quotes, sports scores and weather reports, we in the newspaper industry are used to competition. We welcome it - so long as everyone plays by the same rules.
But if the Bell companies are allowed unlimited entry into information services, the result will be anything but fair competition.
Fair competition cannot exist where you are forced to rely on a competitor to distribute your product. It's as laughable as The Washington Post having to rely on The Wall Street Journal for delivery to its subscribers. The conflict is self-evident.
Moreover, if the Bell companies drive out their rivals, the real losers will be the American people.
Instead of thousands of independent providers of information services, we will have only seven. Competition and innovation will suffer. And we will lose the diversity so vital to our economy and to our democracy.
Anyone who doubts that need only listen to the warning of U.S. District Judge Harold Greene, who in reluctantly ruling in favor of the Bells on July 25 predicted that "the most probable consequences" of their entry into information services "will be the elimination of competition from that market and the concentration of the source of information of the American people in just a few dominant, collaborative conglomerates."
Legislation recently introduced in Congress would enable the Bells to enter the electronic publishing market after giving up their monopolies on local phone service to prevent abuse.
They would be free to offer those services in areas where they hold no monopolistic advantage over the technical means of delivery.
To spur the development of a more diverse, competitive telecommunications industry, Congress should act before the Bell companies have established a beachhead for their assault on the $9 billion-a-year market in electronic information services. Once unleashed, it will be difficult, if not impossible, to go back and rein them in.
The Bell companies must not be allowed to control both the electronic pipeline into almost every American home and office as well as the information that flows through that pipeline.
They must not be allowed to sell valuable, personal information about the telephone habits of their customers to the highest bidders.
(Robert M. Johnson is publisher of Newsday. He is a former chairman of the Telecommunications Committee of the American Newspaper Publishers Association.)