When I think of firms not dependent upon nor beneficiaries of government largesse, market manipulation, and anti-competitive barrier raising, AT&T isn't what comes to mind.
HP? IBM? Oracle? Verizon?
Although "market manipulation" is broad enough to include any large company at all. Same with "anti-competitive barrier rising".
So, we can say that past a certain size companies become evil bastards and have many bad employees and they survive quite well.
They are still not government though, and consumers could choose to stop using their products and they could go out of business. Except they don't.
When I think of firms not dependent upon nor beneficiaries of the government's largesse, the government's market manipulation, and government's anti-competitive barrier raising, AT&T isn't what comes to mind.
And of course the firm's resistance to market forces is not binary, but rather proportional to how close the firm is to the government corpus. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac more so than AT&T more so than Apple.
The cellphone market is highly regulated, but the large computer and software manufactures don't seem to depend on government manipulations.