Playing Devil's advocate, AT&T may have been a barrier to the development of the Internet, but they also owned and funded Bell Labs, whose research (quoting Wikipedia) "are credited with the development of radio astronomy, the transistor, the laser, the charge-coupled device (CCD), information theory, the UNIX operating system, the C programming language, S programming language and the C++ programming language" for which "seven Nobel Prizes have been awarded".
In any case, AT&T was a legal monopoly, not a market player with less than 70% of market share like Google (according to comScore). The lessons are not necessarily directly applicable.
In any case, AT&T was a legal monopoly, not a market player with less than 70% of market share like Google (according to comScore). The lessons are not necessarily directly applicable.