>I remember a lot of comments from angry Americans who were offended by Europeans mocking them about their broadband prices, and telling them that they were being screwed by big American telcos who formed an monopolising alliance artificially keeping prices up.

This is from a small subset of Americans that are always looking for ways to defend large companies and argue against anything that may provide competition to the. It's certainly not the majority; I suspect that it's from employees of these companies that believe the standard company line.

This American, having worked for a small dialup ISP in high school and seeing the dirty tricks telecoms pull, was always with the other Americans that fight the propaganda from large incumbents that carved out geographic chunks of monopolies.