University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School Penn Law: Legal Scholarship Repository Faculty Scholarship at Penn Law 4-1-2013 The Wires Go to War: The U.S. Experiment with Government Ownership of the Telephone System During World War I Michael A. Janson Federal Communications Commission Christopher S. Yoo University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/faculty_scholarship Part of the Antitrust and Trade Regulation Commons, Communications Law Commons, Economic History Commons, Legal History Commons, Other Business Commons, Policy History, Theory, and Methods Commons, Science and Technology Law Commons, and the United States History Commons Repository Citation Janson, Michael A. and Yoo, Christopher S., "The Wires Go to War: The U.S. Experiment with Government Ownership of the Telephone System During World War I" (2013). Faculty Scholarship at Penn Law. 467. https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/faculty_scholarship/467 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by Penn Law: Legal Scholarship Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Scholarship at Penn Law by an authorized administrator of Penn Law: Legal Scholarship Repository. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Articles The Wires Go to War: The U.S. Experiment with Government Ownership of the Telephone System During World War I Michael A. Janson* & Christopher S. Yoo** One of the most distinctive characteristics of the U.S. telephone system is that it has always been privately owned, in stark contrast to the pattern of government ownership followed by virtually every other nation. What is not widely known is how close the United States came to falling in line with the rest of the world.