If there were any doubts about the imperialistic tendencies of the modern telecommunications executive, they should have been dispelled by the events of the past two weeks. The round of mergers between already-gigantic companies has reached an unprecedented level.
The planned union of Deutsche Telekom and Telecom Italia, if consummated, would create a combine with 100 million customers, and a declared intention to extend its reach to millions more. American Telephone & Telegraph, with 70 million residential customers already, would end up owning cable television networks that pass the homes of nearly a third of all US citizens, if its unsolicited $58 billion (€54 billion) bid for MediaOne is accepted.
Other empire-building mergers are already in the works in the US. Two giant US local telephone companies - one assembled from the old networks of Bell Atlantic, GTE and Nynex, the other from SBC Communications, Ameritech and Pacific Telesis - will each end up controlling one-third of the country's nearly 200 million telephone access lines, provided regulators do not object.
On a smaller scale, but no less surprising than the proposed Deutsche Telekom/Telecom Italia marriage, the state-owned national operators of Sweden and Norway have agreed to create a single company which threatens to dominate communications in Scandinavia.
Furthermore, the cellular phone business has not escaped what amounts to the biggest round of takeovers and mergers ever mounted in any industry. In January Vodafone, the UK operator, acquired AirTouch of the US, giving it huge geographic reach and global branding.
Superficially, many of these proposed unions are driven by purely local concerns. But underneath, a common logic is driving the transformation of the industry. Old monopolies, once divided and protected from each other by regulation, have had the shackles taken off. They find themselves in a scary new world, one where big neighbours are starting to throw their weight around.
There is also a new band of low-cost, technologically advanced rivals, rising up with the declared intention of skimming off their best customers.
Increasingly, these clients are multinational organisations. Operators are thus being forced to devise strategies for expansion outside their national boundaries.
It is not surprising, then, that many traditional operators have adopted the same response: to put together the largest mass of networks and customers that regulators will allow them.
The question for regulators and politicians is: if the operators' strategy works, will it kill off the hoped-for benefits that liberalisation of telecoms markets was meant to bring in the first place?
While their regulatory histories differ, the mergers pursued by American and European carriers in response to liberalisation have been driven by the three basic desires. The first, and most powerful, has been the pursuit of size for its own sake. To this could be added a natural fear on the part of telecom executives: that by staying apart from the new giant groupings, they may risk being marginalised. But there is no guarantee that scale will bring success.
Global alliances such as Global One, the partnership between Deutsche Telekom, France Telecom and Sprint of the US, have so far failed to generate profits despite huge investment.
The second motivating force behind the mergers has been the attempt to assemble networks that extend to as many customers as possible, reducing the need to pay fees to use a rival's lines.
Whether for business or residential customers, though, the most valuable piece of the network may turn out to be the so-called "last mile", the connection that runs into a home or office.
AT&T may well be the most glaring proof of this fact. Confined to the long-distance market since the old Ma Bell was broken up in 1984, the company has only recently been allowed to own direct links to its customers again. Without them, it could face an uncertain future: its revenues from long-distance calls will fall gradually over the next five years, according to projections issued by the company last week.
The value of those local connections has been rising fast, according to Mr Dan Somers, AT&T's chief financial officer. When it agreed to buy its first cable television company last year, AT&T offered the equivalent of $2,700 for each of TCI's subscribers: for MediaOne, it has bid $4,700. Those cables could eventually become a lifeline, providing a link to carry voice calls and data as well as video signals to customers.
That points to the third force behind the recent mergers. A customer who buys only basic telephone services today may spend far more on whatever new services are piped down the high-speed broadband connections that the telephone companies promise. By amassing as many customers as possible now, the biggest carriers are trying to assemble captive markets for the future.
But the prospect of companies that still dominate their local markets banding together through merger does not seem inherently good for competition. Will they simply carve up the world's most prosperous economies between themselves, then be content to stand back from head-on confrontation?
The biggest hope for fans of competition comes from the difficulty that former monopolies, with their non-commercial mindset and heavy cost structures, have in adapting to new circumstances, and from the technological revolution that has made it possible for new entrants to leapfrog older rivals.
As telecoms companies on both sides of the Atlantic struggle to shed their old selves, they risk losing ground to companies that do not carry this historical baggage. The latest fibre technology has given these new networks the sort of capacity that was undreamt of even five years ago - each of the networks being created by the US carriers Qwest, Level 3 and Williams would be capable of carrying as much traffic as the entire US long-distance infrastructure. That makes it possible to spread capital costs over many more calls, producing unit costs that are difficult for incumbents to beat.
