It's worth thinking about the really long arc of the telephone, too. It's still a vitally important technology for mass communication, but the struggle to break up the monopoly power of AT&T is an interesting lesson for the future. On one hand, that actually had some important democratizing effects--including allowing the growth of the early Internet via existing telephone networks, something that would likely have been completely impossible in a strongly maintained monopoly environment. On the other hand, it's left us with phone communications that are 100% undefended against incessant robocalling, because no one selling access to phone networks gives a shit any longer about whether people stop paying for landlines because of robocalling or stop using phone networks to communicate at all. It's not worth doing anything about the problem for the remaining ownerships and nobody has the political clout to get lawmakers to care either.
It's worth thinking about the really long arc of the telephone, too. It's still a vitally important technology for mass communication, but the struggle to break up the monopoly power of AT&T is an interesting lesson for the future. On one hand, that actually had some important democratizing effects--including allowing the growth of the early Internet via existing telephone networks, something that would likely have been completely impossible in a strongly maintained monopoly environment. On the other hand, it's left us with phone communications that are 100% undefended against incessant robocalling, because no one selling access to phone networks gives a shit any longer about whether people stop paying for landlines because of robocalling or stop using phone networks to communicate at all. It's not worth doing anything about the problem for the remaining ownerships and nobody has the political clout to get lawmakers to care either.