Any large-scale unbundling proposal, which would necessarily target the cable networks, would be fairly unprecedented. To date, unbundling has been applied where the government had a stake in the networks to begin with. The POTS network was constructed by AT&T, a government-sanctioned monopoly. In the U.K., the phone network was built by BT when it was a public corporation. The modern cable networks were built mostly after cable companies lost their local monopolies in 1996.