No, but government could easily have opted for a regulatory regime that prevented it from being a problem, instead of allowing them to continue milking their situation.
The EU member states implementation of deregulation of the telecoms sector is far from perfect, but most of them have ended with something that works reasonably well.
E.g. in the UK, while the cable operator (there's only one of note left standing) has mostly escaped regulation, but BT had it's last-mile infrastructure subjected to heavy regulation to the point where it's been split out into its own company (OpenReach) that maintains the network and is legally obliged to resell access to anyone at the same terms.
You can even get the prices to terminate an IP connection with a subscriber on their website.
ISPs can put equipment in the BT exchanges and get a raw connection, or can pay for "backhaul" to a set of central locations.
I know the US also has a form of local-loop unbundling, but it's clearly not working very well given the level of complaints people have about these services in the US. Possibly because of the price-setting mechanism?
As a result there's a lot of competition in the ISP space in the UK (as there is elsewhere in the EU).
(Where it's not perfect is that the way the regulations have been set up gives too few incentives for BT to invest and innovate in the last mile network and is often accused of milking OpenReach for profit; two ways of improving on that would be to restrict how much profit they could take out as dividends to a proportion of how much they reinvest in network improvements and/or split maintenance/operation into regional franchises and force companies like OpenReach to bid for it on a franchise basis; though the latter is hard to get the evaluation-criteria right for)