After establishing it as a federal monopoly in 1934. (And in TFA, we're talking British Telecom.)

Similarly, there are a lot of municipal agreements in the US where one company gets the exclusive right to handle local phone or cable service within a city or region. More companies or smaller companies doesn't mean any benefit for consumers when they still just end up choosing between "the phone company" and "the cable company" as designated by law.

In order to regulate it (putting it under jurisdiction of the FCC) as Bell was already a natural monopoly by this point, even after the Kingsbury Commitment.

Here you say that we needed regulation to make AT&T a de jure national monopoly so that we could further regulate AT&T.

So, regulation grants monopolies, then regulates those monopolies, then also regulates more competition into the monopoly market it had previously granted? This is good governance?

Likewise, in many European countries, telecoms were originally national monopolies. Both in Europe and in the United States those national monopolies were either broken up or subjected to more competition.

VMG is quite correct to point out that telecoms gained monopoly status due to government action.

* In Europe, it was generally an artificial monopoly through a state company, Ma Bell was a natural monopoly sanctioned by the federal government.

* Where Ma Bell was broken up following an antitrust case, most european monopolies were simply privatized along with new regulations (or deregulations depending on the market) forcing them to open up their market (instead of turtling)