Back in 1984 when the Bell System was under indictment by the DOJ for antitrust violations that was one option that was evaluated. In fact, interesting tid bit,

Back in 1984 when the Bell System was under indictment by the DOJ for antitrust violations that was one option that was evaluated. In fact, interesting tid bit, the phone company was briefly nationalized during WWI (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_AT%26T https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_AT%26T) and was run by the Post Office, similar to how some European countries have done but that arrangement lasted about 1 year. What the DOJ did was to negotiate a settlement which basically divested (broke up) the Bell System into a number of smaller companies. An option that was also floated at the time was to instead require that all communities and states issue at least 2 franchise agreements to two different companies that would be formed from the Bell companies and form a duopoly which in my view would have been a much better approach (it worked fairly well for a time with the mobile phone industry) but the Bell companies lobbied hard against that and instead proposed the settlement of the break up because then they would still hold effectively geographic monopolies. That in my view, was the major error that the DOJ made because it just promulgated the problem on a smaller scale rather than addressing the root cause.