I at least partly disagree with this article in that those are not the only 4 companies specifically necessitating a breakup and that the problems they represent are partly structural (besides the idea of fixed telecom being a natural monopoly).

First of all, the deal with home internet in the united states, specifically for fixed broadband, is for a notable majority of Americans choosing between DOCSIS Cable Broadband and a nearly unusable if not outright defunct DSL based off of their former pots copper telephone infrastructure.

This came from a couple sources, most notably the Bell System breakup and re-mergers in which the regulated natural monopoly AT&T (otherwise known as the Bell System) was broken apart into several local telephone companies in hopes that working in their own self interest they would be more competitive and build out overlapping infrastructure (they didn't). The fate for a vast majority of these companies minus a few notable offshoots was mergers, particularly back into (the modern) AT&T (Bell South) and Verizon (Bell Atlantic). These companies were paid very large contracts, multiple millions, by the Federal Government during the 90s and 00s to build out Fiber to the Home to all of their Territories (the money was pocketed and mostly invested in mobile networks with higher profit margins and the fiber with some exceptions never materialized). Verizon's best rate of fiber coverage being 50% of New Jersians along the not negligible but still obviously halted buildout of the American East Coast, or some very belated buildouts such as the recent AT&T FTTH builds in areas formerly served by their VDSL, oddly AT&T was the only copper operator to release any form of VDSL in the United States despite companies like Consolidation Communications or Frontier having much to benefit from doing so as they still don't currently meet or exceed 20mbps on their respective DSL networks to most customers leading to many leaving for their cable operators.

Speaking of the cable operators, cable companies built out starting in the 70s and 80s analog pay-tv services, and being a fully conspicuous luxury they were not turned down when they started printing out contracts to various towns stating that they would only serve them if they signed territory exclusivity contracts to prevent tv overbuilds. This evolved into a non-comptetetive happy little accident when Cable internet got a hold of cable modems and became the most fast broadband anyone could possibly purchase in America due to its nature of generally being much better than its competing ADSL. Following this a vast majority of people switched over only to find that Cable internet was rapidly becoming their only viable option for an internet connection, and their cable companies knew it. This combined with an unholy amount of red tape placed down by cable company lobbies lead to a horrifying mess of red tape in the way of anyone attempting to build out competitive internet offerings, to such that even GOOGLE could not break into ISP markets in big cities with their ungodly deep pockets despite being welcomed as heroes for trying due to their potential customers absolutely HATED their cable providers with a burning passion due to the way they treat their customers knowing they have no usable alternatives. An example of this would be many cable ISPs putting completely arbitrary broadband data caps on their cable internet connections that automatically charge customers for going over the caps despite having absolutely no technical reason to do so, caps that can not be paid to have removed and did not exist on any of their tiers of internet plants for over a decade prior. What are you going to do, buy home internet from somewhere else?

How do you fix this? I'm not sure, I just think pinning it on the 4 most massive ISPs is dumb when the problems are structural and directly benefit even small ISPs that partake in the system such as smaller Cable Operators that work in the same non-overbuild pacts that most others do. I want to see these 4 companies burn just as much as the next American but learning from history and the baby bells smashing them into a bunch of smaller companies never really seemed to help.