Re: Black arm bands for everyone
"... Imagine if in the plain old telephone days that AT&T owned a share of Pizza Hut. They easily could have blocked all phone calls going to Dominos or even rerouted them to Pizza Hut. ..."
There is a precedent:
In 1888, Almon Brown Strowger, a Kansas City undertaker, discovered that one of the operators at the local, manual telephone exchange was diverting callers who asked for "an undertaker" to her husband (a rival undertaker).
His response was to invent the Strowger Automatic Telephone Exchange.