That explains why they had multiple live TV services that competed with each other for a while there. It’s got to be something more complicated than just being too big. When AT&T (the old AT&T that went defunct in 2006) was at its biggest and most monopolistic, it also ran one of the country’s most innovative R&D laboratories, but they kept that technology tightly in their grip except when government regulators forced them to loosen it.

The smartest regulations that the government imposed on them are the ones that forced AT&T to stay primarily as a telephone operator and not get into new industries, because that allowed competitors to come into existence and not be squashed out of existence immediately. For example, a court order that disallowed AT&T from entering the computer business made it so that AT&T could only profit off of UNIX by licensing the source code out to others as a trade secret, allowing computer scientists to learn from and build off of the development that AT&T funded. Then those people built their own UNIX-compatible operating systems, and that’s how we got FreeBSD and Linux, which are used as the basis for every mainstream operating system today (except windows). So because of smart regulation in the 70s, businesses today can reuse that free code, rather than starting from scratch, making modern businesses more efficient. That turned out to be more meaningful than even the breakup of the Bell System