No, he said that the government breaking up the monopoly was "criminal"
I guess that is why one should quote a line or two of the comment he or she is responding to. The one you were actually responding to was hidden.
And when I say "simple engineering", I mean standard engineering practice. No one in his right mind designs a mission critical system for tens of thousands of people without full redundancy and usually automatic failover as well. A system that size that goes down for more than five minutes is more likely to be the result of engineering malpractice than anything else.
I still have a traditional land line, because it is reliable. I can't remember ever picking it the phone up and not having a dial tone. That would most definitely not be the case with any other kind of service available to residences and small businesses. The PSTN was designed to be reliable, and the people who designed readily available Internet access service designed it by the same standards that one might use for toys. Entertainment devices.
No one cares very much if they can't watch I Love Lucy for a couple of hours, although every television station I am aware of is about three orders of magnitude more reliable than the DSL / cable monopolies as well, if not quite as reliable as the PSTN.