103 years ago, the UK government nationalized the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Telephone_Company. Within two years of that, the US justice department managed to extract from AT&T the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingsbury_Commitment. In this, AT&T, unlike NTC, was allowed to keep ownership of its respective telephone network in exchange for interconnecting fairly with its competitors.

There were fights at the municipal level too, but by that point, only a few medium-sized places like Hull in the UK, and Rochester, New York had phone companies that weren't owned by NTC or AT&T.

All of this seems strikingly familiar today, except that there seem to be a lot fewer politicians willing to propose any of the real profound changes like the ones that came a century ago.