I have used telecommunication services for over a decade now, and I have never once done business with AT&T or a Mabell company.
Perhaps it's YOU who needs a sense of proportion. It isn't 1984 anymore. Mabell isn't a massive monopoly: Google, however, is becoming one.
...Verizon, SBC, CenturyLink, Qwest, FairPoint, Frontier, etc.? Eh, seems unlikely. Or perhaps the extent of your telecom purchasing is cell service from an MVNO? Guess where the majority of your payments are going... Apparently it is difficult for some people outside telecom to separate what's going on from the marketing of what's going on. Don't feel bad: back in the late 1990s I believed the hype too.