Name three monopolies that were broken up while it made a difference. In which of those cases did consumer prices go down as a result of the breakup?
The only "broken up while it made a difference" case that I'm aware of is Standard Oil. However, the result was higher prices, not lower. (Standard absolutely hammered transportation companies and passed on the savings to consumers. After the breakup, transportation companies could turn down biz from one oil company to get biz from another and thus were able to raise their prices. That's why railroads pushed for the breakup.)
The carterfone decision, which happened before that, is what gave us phone choice.
There was some post-breakup price-reduction in local services, but they all came from the local monopolies that were the result of the AT&T breakup. The services themselves, with the exception of caller-id, were offered by pre-breakup AT&T but were more expensive. Since the land-line service price decline happened when cell-phone carriers started offering those same services for less, I think that cell-phone competition gets the credit, not the breakup.
And beige was available before green. (I think that white was as well.)
