Building the hardware layer for a telecom network requires access to public land, and often private land where the landowners may not be cooperative. In exchange for the government enabling the telecom to build its network, the government gets to impose rules, sometimes even mandating competitor access to said network.

Facebook is different. The internet is already there, and is not owned by any single entity. Facebook does not need to compel cooperation from anyone to operate. It does not invite regulation in the same way a telecom does.

Now, there are plenty of people who believe that anything is fair game for the government to regulate if it's in the public interest, but I think that position is less universally accepted than that of trading special privileges for regulation.

Telephone tariffs in some parts of the world made long distance relationships very hard. Monopolists (often government controlled) took consumers to the cleaners every chance they got.

Only in the last two decades have prices finally been coming down.

So even those $2000 phone bills could easily be legitimate communication.

Today I'm still very conscious of the time I spend 'on the phone', especially when abroad. On mobile phones I've been hit more than once with a surprise bill because of living close to the border that was in that neighborhood (but the phone company was good about dropping those charges because even if I was on Dutch soil my phone kept switching to a German base station that was very strong where I lived).