> When these patents expired, there were soon 80 competing companies which captured 5% of the market, rising to over 3,000 companies with over 50% of the market by 1900.
And starting in 1907 and the return of Vail, Bell started massively buying them out, attracting the attention of the Justice Department and leading to the Kingsbury Commitment. Kingsbury was essentially repealed 8 years later by the Willis Graham Act, which more or less removed the Commitment's regulatory barriers for acquisition by AT&T, by shifting all oversight to the ICC's rubber-stamping.
> Then during WW1, this monopoly was given "for reasons of national security". If you think that the monopoly came about by market forces then government came to save us, yes there is some revision needed.
The monopoly was already there, Bell was temporarily nationalized during WW1.
> AT&T then lobbied for its monopoly status back, saying the telephone "by the nature of its technology would operate most efficiently as a monopoly providing universal service."
And this was given in 1921 by the Willis-Graham, which removed the regulatory hurdles put in place in 1913 when Bell was already a monopoly or near-monopoly.