I definitely agree that the law was not written with clarity in mind. On the one hand, that gives flexibility to those companies which might try to skirt legislation through technicality, but it bites the other way too, in that the executive needs to be very willing to enforce and defend its enforcement.

I wholly disagree that it failed to achieve anything meaningfully as policy, though. Under Sherman AT&T was split, which, before the baby bells all merged back together to create the present oligopoly, provided a much more competitive landscape for the telecom industry. And who knows what we would have seen if the original Microsoft decision was held up calling for a break up, instead of the neutered decision we saw come out of their appeal.