[belly_joe]

I think this is a good point that doesn't get discussed enough.

Was Bell bad for the consumer? Yes, probably. Was the benefit of the increase in innovation a net benefit for society when compared to deadweight loss incurred by monopoly pricing? I don't know.

There is almost no way to answer this question in a rigorous manner, and yet it's extremely important for policy. The only thing I can think of is experiment over a long period of time between distinct geographies and see what happens.

[criddell]

If basic R&D is underfunded by the public, allowing monopolies to overcharge consumers and pass some of that money on to their proprietary research departments isn't a great solution.

We should guard against monopolies and increase public funding of researchers.

[thundergolfer]

In what way was Bell Labs bad for the consumer? I don’t know the history.

[zmflavius]

Not Bell Labs specifically, but its parent company AT&T had a vertically integrated monopoly which gave them control over essentially all communications technology, and also virtually all telephone service, which it used to dictate (high) prices and constrain the growth of their competitors.

Now, the monopoly profits AT&T may have been worth it, because without them, AT&T would not have funded Bell Labs creating among other things C, Unix, the transistor, the laser, and photovoltaic solar cells.

I will just note that if you want to measure it was worth it, consider what the GNU in GNU Linux is commonly held to stand for.