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In general "grrr greedy capitalists" is only ever a satisfying answer in the same sense that "grrr Schrodinger equation" is. Technically both ideas explain a whole lot, but if you're ever looking for an explanation for why something changed, say, between 1980 and 1990, you can't solely check in the laws of economics or physics.
In this case, ironically, "Some simply gesture at "grrr greedy capitalists"" might be the explanation. Ma Bell was an enormous company with a quasi-governmental monopoly, so they could expect to be able to capture most of the value of even relatively pure and fundamental research ... and then anti-trust action broke them up into a bunch of Baby Bell companies who could only capture the value of research that was sufficiently applied and peripheral to turn a profit before its patent(s) would expire. By what may have been a wacky coincidence, but of course wasn't, Bell Labs got a ton of funding before the breakup and not so much after.
Despite my snark, I believe it's possible that the loss to research was exceeded by the gains of breaking up the quasi-monopoly. I'm old enough to remember land lines, and adding a second phone to the same line by just adding a splitter and running one cable to another room; a little further back in time, this would have required a call to The phone company to get permission and a technician and an extra monthly surcharge. It's easy to imagine that an indefinite continuation of this state of affairs in the USA could have crippled the nascent internet, which for years was only accessible to most residences via modems piggy-backing data over phone lines.
Ideally, handling the collective action problems of research without a giant monopoly (or, at least, with a giant monopoly we all get to control on election day) is what University research is supposed to be for; we try to give University researchers the proper incentives to try to come up with ideas that will be useful decades down the road, not just years. If we did that right, we should have been able to cut up the fabled goose here without losing out on all the golden eggs. To a great extent, University research works, even! I agree with your suspicions that we didn't entirely do that right, and with your explanations for why it doesn't work as well as it should, but I wouldn't want to come to any strong conclusions without trying to quantify those magnitudes somehow.
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