Honest question because it's something I've internally debated over. Would we have had Bell Labs without the AT&T monopoly?

No, organizational slack and a willingness to spend on r&d is required for labs to exist. Monopolies can afford expensive r&d.

> Would we have had Bell Labs without the AT&T monopoly?

The implication here is that Bell Labs was a good thing. While I find it hard to say I wouldn't have loved to have been a part of something like that, I think we may have been better off without it, considering what it squashed.

Would we have had a single lab that became famous for so many things? No. Would we have got thousands of smaller labs that added up to more innovation? Maybe.

AT&T was heavily regulated (common carrier) through much of it's history and was a big part of the reason that BellLabs was so influential. Not true of SpaceX and Starlink.