There was a competitive communications infrastructure before the USG decided to nationalize it all and AT&T managed to lobby themselves into a weird government-

There was a competitive communications infrastructure before the USG decided to nationalize it all and AT&T managed to lobby themselves into a weird government-mandated monopoly position. If AT&T had not been granted a monopoly competitive pressure would have forced something like NANPA to be developed and we probably would have ended up with LNP a bit faster. On the other hand AT&T’s monopoly provided funding to Bell Labs which had more to do with our modern world than DARPA. The Internet as we know it today couldn’t exist until the government in the form of the NSF and their government & research only rules were bypassed by commercial interests.