Legal Monopoly

See: Monopoly.

Microsoft's Windows Operating System was a legal one. For a while, anyway. AT&T's ownership of local Regional Bell Operating Companies was a legal one. Local power companies are legal and regulated monopolies.

Monopolies carry an odd role in business and social and political spheres, in that they're sometimes a mandated good thing. Like when the U.S. Government decried that every single home in America should be wired for telephone service a century ago. It granted legal monopoly to AT&T in return for the behemoth's agreement to wire literally everyone. That monopoly's profits were regulated to give set returns to shareholders (some huge percentage of Americans at the time owned AT&T.) And it helped build out the infrastructure of the country. A good thing by any measure, unless you're a loner unibomber with a phone fear fetish.

Then there were monopolies that were more or less purchased, acquired, cajoled, or forcibly bolted together. Rockefeller, Carnegie, and others with railroads and banking and oil. They were eventually deemed to be illegal, broken up, and regionalized. And then there are entities like power companies, which almost have to be monopolies, because it makes less than no financial sense to have two or more competing power companies, delivering the same service everyone needs. The initial cost of infrastructure and damage to the environment makes legal monopolies the only way to go.

Monopolies. They're great...if you own one. (Didn't Uncle Bill say that?)