That is by design?Bell was broken up by the government. It didn’t become what it is today without that intervention.
The anti trust policies till the early 80s and seeing a revival currently with Lina khan and the FTC is not to have monopolistic companies.
Bell labs could be funded because of the monopoly of Ma bell . Larger organizations do not efficiently use capital to really innovate.
Bell labs was really great for research, but Ma bell wasn’t all that successful bringing that research as products to market . Same reason why Google couldn’t get GPTs to market like OpenAI could or GM couldn’t make an electric car successful like Tesla did or SpaceX innovating better than ULA, Boeing et al.
We ideally want companies to grow and die, not become rent seeking models that occasionally throw some scraps for research or CSR activities while returning bulk of the value extracted to shareholders without innovating on their products
