That’s what people said about AT&T before we broke it up in 1982 - that it would hurt innovation. This was the company that had Bell Labs after all.
Instead, we had an absolute revolution in communication technology since - from fax lines, to modems, to cell connections, to the commercial internet.
It turns out that innovation happens more often when there is a lot of competition in the market. And the market figures out how to build standards for interop - you don’t need all of the products from the same company to get them to work together.
Your claim about innovation thriving when there is competition may be true, but your examples run counter to that. Commercial fax machines, modems, TCP/IP, Arpanet,and cell phones all predate the AT&T breakup.
Did we really have an absolute revolution in communication? I'm not so sure there is evidence to back that statement up.
Or at least none to suggest that innovation happened because if the breakup
Instead, we had an absolute revolution in communication technology since - from fax lines, to modems, to cell connections, to the commercial internet.
It turns out that innovation happens more often when there is a lot of competition in the market. And the market figures out how to build standards for interop - you don’t need all of the products from the same company to get them to work together.