From 1913 to 1984, the United States had a government-sanctioned telephone monopoly, in some form or another, with very heavy government involvement in the industry. From the 1950s, many homes in America even had the same telephone: the Western Electric Model 500 rotary, with some minor variations over the years. The U.S. government limited what telephone companies could be used, and the Bell System (AT&T) limited what telephones could be used.
That anti-competitive system created by government massively slowed development in residential telecommunications. In 1984, those Model 500 rotary phones, very similar to the model that had first been developed in the late 1940s and brought to the market in the 1950s, were still in use. They said telephone service was a “natural monopoly,” so many people considered all of this an appropriate relationship between government and business.
