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Bloomberg

The Second Breakup of AT&T

(Bloomberg) — AT&T Inc. has been called many things over its 135-year history: Ma Bell, monopoly, media conglomerate. The company, which traces its roots to the patent rights of telephone inventor Alexander Graham Bell, was the dominant phone company for much of the 20th century. So dominant, in fact, that it was broken up in 1982 as part of an agreement with antitrust authorities. But those businesses eventually began to merge, culminating with SBC Communications — one of the so-called Baby Bells — acquiring AT&T in 2005 and taking the name.That wasn’t the end of it. What followed was a streak of deal-making that turned AT&T into a new behemoth spanning television, media and advertising. After a failed attempt to acquire T-Mobile, the company bought satellite-TV provider DirecTV in 2015 for $49 billion, becoming the biggest provider of…