Wasn't ATT before the divestiture their day's equivalent of an owner of infrastructure and a controller, if not owner, of "content?" You got good, reliable service. What was more reliable than the phone?
You got good, reliable service until anything went wrong or you tried to change anything or you tried to get a less nosey line to use a modem on or you wanted to use a different style of phone.
Is this kind of like how you get good, reliable service from Google until "anything goes wrong", like your Adsense account is erroneously suspended, your site is erroneously blacklisted from their search results, or your Gmail account is erroneously disabled and/or deleted? There is story after story after story of what happens when your interactions with Google require human attention, and it's not pretty.
When there is no competition then companies can afford to be lazy or ignore customer complaints. AdSense has no real competition, so Google just doesn't care if they have one less customer.
In the local access area, fiber from Google would increase competition, so would be a good thing.
