Reddit mentions of City of Light: The Story of Fiber Optics (Sloan Technology)

Just to show that I'm not making up these complaints, here's an excellent review of the disastrous side-effects of the Communications Act of 1934 that gave AT&T a national monopoly on phone service. Also, in Jeff Hecht's book City of Light, he traces the invention of fiberoptics and the frightening zeal of AT&T to suppress the development and deployment of the technology in favor of AT&T patented, vastly inferior microwave waveguides. Billions in taxpayer dollars were spent on waveguide technology, and it was never competitive.

And this is just phone service. Imagine if similar national monopolies barring competition had been struck for water, food, electricity, fuel.