...you also assume that the phone monopoly was always a bad idea. It did allow the company to safely invest in infrastructure and technology, as well as establishing technological protocols/standards. I believe the Ma Bell monopoly became a bad idea and that’s the reason it was busted up.
Perhaps you should consider phone service from the 1930's through the 1960's. Then consider the changes in the phone services just in the last 10 years.
The first period was one of stagnation. There really wasn't much difference in the services other than refinement of trunk line handling and switching equipment allowing subscribers to get private lines. The hand devices had literally NO improvements.
During the last 10 years you have seen wireless EVERYWHERE, my phone provider lists 16 different features available with their phone, I have wireless phone service within my house. That has nothing to do with Ma Bell's phone monopoly, you say! Yes it does, Ma Bell wouldn't allow any NON-Bell equipment to be connected to their precious phone network. They claimed it would harm the reliability. Therefore, for many years, you could get a phone any color you wanted, as long as it was black. They finally relented on that issue and there were color choices! WOO-HOO!! That is the type of service you get out of a monopoly server.
And I get free long distance with my cell phone. For years long distance was considered a premium service.
In The Beginning, Ma Bell was a "natural monopoly." Imagine if competing phone companies were running around, each putting up posts and running wires, each with its own subscriber base that could talk amongst themselves, but not to other companies' subscribers without paying stiff fees (if at all). It would have been hard to get the thing off the ground.
When the technology made it feasible for other companies to handle the switching and transmission from the customer's one wire pair, first in long distance and then in local service, the monopoly no longer made sense.
Actually, let me rephrse -- much smaller, local monopolies made sense. I can choose from a number of cable and DSL providers, but Bell South still maintains the one and only copper pair coming to my house. I can choose from among seferal natural gas providers, but Atlanta Gas Light still runs the one gas line coming to my house. The monopolies became smaller because it became more feasible for a small last-mile monopoly to provide access to multiple providers.
Actually a major reason “why it was busted up” was because the federal judge overseeing the antitrust case wasn’t very competant and believed all of the pie in the sky promises made by the antitrust plaintiffs. Several years after the case was decided, the judge was quoted as saying roughly — “I don’t understand what happened! They promised me that if I gave them what they wanted, everything was going to work out.”