Not really; they just lobbied the Bush II Administration into crippling the Clinton-era rules that required them to allow competitive DSL providers. The requir

Not really; they just lobbied the Bush II Administration into crippling the Clinton-era rules that required them to allow competitive DSL providers. The requirement was called "Local Loop Unbundling" and it required the RBOCs (legacy local telcos, from when the Bell System was broken up) to lease "dry pairs" to various competitive DSL providers at reasonable and nondiscriminatory rates. And for a few years it worked! The dialup ISPs started to move into DSL services and it looked like we would have real competition (admittedly DSL, but this looked decent enough at the time). But they lobbied the shit out of Congress and got LLU killed in the early 00s.