Your local cable company was granted a monopoly on cable TV service in exchange for wiring your community. Such monopolies are now forbidden.
Completely false. You had a massive blackout because the (regulated) power distribution companies were not held to an appropriate standard of reliability and capital investment. Competitive power generation did not cause the blackout.
There is no "national grid", unless you're referring to the distribution company National Grid. Even allowing for what you probably meant, it's still not true, and still a red herring: power distribution is still regulated, both by the states and by the Federal Energy Commission.
"Everyone Knew" that you couldn't carry even 100 MHz of television spectrum over telephone wiring, and of course many people had perfectly good antennas, so why would telephone subscribers have been forced to subsidize the construction of cable television networks?
You don't believe, I hope, that they give you "a good deal" out of the goodness of their hearts ... They give you "a good deal" becase there's a competitive marketplace for long-distance communications services, and (unlike local service, until very recently) you have a choice of carriers.
The economy does. I don't have the definition available off the top of my head, but any microeconomics textbook will give you a set of objective criteria, which when applied retrospectively to observations of an existing marketplace will tell you if it's a natural monopoly.
What makes you think you didn't benefit from having that choice?
-GAWollman
-- Garrett A. Wollman | As the Constitution endures, persons in every snipped-for-privacy@csail.mit.edu | generation can invoke its principles in their own Opinions not those | search for greater freedom. of MIT or CSAIL. | - A. Kennedy, Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558 (2003)