That sounds exactly like a binary, as hinted at by a sibling comment: Breakup of a company monopoly (always good for the consumer) vs. Breakup of a government monopoly (potentially bad for the consumer)
> because of the part on how local phone rates went up when AT&T was broken up.
Isn't that caused by the "last mile" problem? Even with the split there was always only one company in control of local infrastructure and from what I understand they could even block newcomers from installing their own, citing concerns over possible service interuptions and various kinds of interference. I think Google Fibre even went through several experimental ways to get its infrastructure in place just so it could avoid dealing with any of that.
In that case, it mostly just created local monopolies. You still didn’t have a choice for local service unless you moved several hundred miles away. From the consumer’s perspective, we just replaced one monopoly with another.
