It's not a perfect answer, but we can look at other industrialized countries where nothing like Bell Labs existed.
An easy citation would be CERN. They gave us the WWW, but then CERN is a monopoly in its own right, given that no one else has similar facilities, similar requirements, or a comparable base of talent to draw from.
Other than CERN, I'm drawing a blank here. Examples, anyone?
The question isn't whether those things are nice, it's whether they wouldn't have been developed as fast in a competitive environment.
(Personally, I think just based on human nature that competition is anti-innovative in the long run, but I can't prove anything either way.)
The question is what we lost because we did those things.
We know what happened, we don't know what alternative histories would have been like. We don't know if they would have been better or worse.
It's not a perfect answer, but we can look at other industrialized countries where nothing like Bell Labs existed.
An easy citation would be CERN. They gave us the WWW, but then CERN is a monopoly in its own right, given that no one else has similar facilities, similar requirements, or a comparable base of talent to draw from.
Other than CERN, I'm drawing a blank here. Examples, anyone?
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