And compared to virtually every nationalized telecom it provided better, cheaper service that was universally available.

Internet access should be regulated like it was a utility however, and that's the great failing of public policy in that area.

Cheaper!?!?! I had $1200 one month long distance bill in 1984. That today is effectively free. Only competition made that happen. If AT&T was still in charge we'd be paying by the call and by the byte.

The price of long distance has more to do with the changes in technology since then than the regulatory environment. Competitive long distance could have happened without lifting the overall regulatory framework that governed telecommunications for 60+ years. Sometime between 1975 and 2005, long haul bandwidth became effectively free - consider that in 1975 the widest bandwidth deployed carrier system was about 108,000 simultaneous calls, a fiber system deployed in 1999, is now carrying 320gb/s which if I did my math right works out to 500m simultaneous calls.

To give you an idea, a residential phone bill from 1982 with unlimited local calling in Seattle was around 13.50 inclusive, in 2019, that same service cost 50 dollars - inflation alone would expect the cost of that service to only be 36 dollars or so - and technological advantages should make that service cheaper, not more expensive.

AT&T was a different company, at one point before divestiture they were the single largest private employer (1973) in the US, providing union jobs with good benefits and stable (effectively) lifetime employment. Beyond this, they were also a leader in providing equal opportunity for minorities.

The money generated by AT&T was paid back in technology dividends - dividends that underpin much of the technological innovation we've seen over the last 60 years.

AT&T's disaster preparedness is a whole other topic that could be gone into as well.

That seems overly simplistic, especially considering my phone bill today is still billed by the byte, for instance.

You seem to have interpreted this as monopoly prices were less than today's prices.

My read of the parent comment is that monopoly era phone service from AT&T was cheaper when compared to phone service in other parts of the world during that era.

I can't speak to the veracity of this claim.

I was making the argument that the price for a local loop was price competitive with nationalized telecoms, but with little to no wait to have service provisioned - in many cases though the nationalized services were cheaper, by far even - but you may be pressed with a months or years long wait to establish service, because of capacity limitations, similarly in some countries you often would have experienced a dial tone delay of minutes from the time you picked up the phone, and/or would have had to schedule your long distance call many hours or days in advance because of limited circuit capacity.

And I ask, what's the difference? Let's try not to be pedantic here, because if they are a legal monopoly, at the end of the day they have to do what the government says, because if they don't the government could just tear the monopoly down and prop up competitors.

1) Ownership

Nationalized companies are owned by the state. AT&T had/has private shareholders.

2) Control

With ownership comes control. The U.S. government granted AT&T a conditional monopoly. In the early 20th century it was in exchange for extending service across the nation. Mid-20th century for defense work.

Aside from these conditions the U.S. government did not exert control on AT&T's operations.

>Nationalized companies are owned by the state. AT&T had/has private shareholders.

I feel like this is being pedantic. While there are shareholders, taxpayers have funded the infrastructure and are paying for it in the form of tax breaks.