Maybe some people don't remember or is was before their time, but for many many years, you could not actually own your own phone. You had to lease your phone fr

Maybe some people don't remember or is was before their time, but for many many years, you could not actually own your own phone. You had to lease your phone from the phone company. It was not until the Carter Phone decision that paved the way and forced the phone company (Bell Telephone / AT&T, not Today's AT&T) to allow someone to attach their own device to the Phone companies lines. The Carter phone was one of the earliest modems and it was not even electrically connected to the wires it was acoustically coupled. But really they just did not want people using their network that way. The network design was based on a average holding time of 2 minutes per call, but once people started using it to transmit data between computers and people or between computers, the holding times went through the roof forcing them to spend a lot of capital to keep up with the demand. Maybe the analogy is more similar to wireless carriers that lock their phones ? I am not sure there are any exact analogies here to Google or anyone else. The phone company was, prior to 1984, considered a natural monopoly and was given special exception from antitrust laws. Google is in no way considered a natural monopoly, although some could argue that the DoJ looks the other way just a little bit when it comes to some of the Tech giants, I will leave that argument to others to hash out. But in no way are they sanctioned to the degree that the Telephone companies were in the early days in my view.