Originally, carriers were legally forbidden to have any financial interest in "content." Thus the telephone company could not give you a better or worse connection depending on whether they did or didn't like you or the words you said in conversations.
According to some accounts, Almon Strowger, an undertaker, was motivated to invent an automatic telephone exchange after having difficulties with the local telephone operators, one of whom was the wife of a competitor. He was said to be convinced that she, as one of the manual telephone exchange operators was sending calls "to the undertaker" to her husband.[citation needed]