> Congress could (and in my opinion, should) completely preempt these things, but that's a hard sell.
It's always easier to do what big telecom wants. So we have action on "deregulating" Net Neutrality which allows the telecoms to further leverage their local monopoly power, but no action which might actually put those monopolies in danger of real competition.
> It's always easier to do what big telecom wants.
I'm pretty sure that "big telecom" never wanted to have their exclusive franchises eliminated, to be forced to provide non-discriminatory access to poles and ducts, be forced to provide universal service, etc. But Congress did all those things in the 1996 act. The cynicism misconceives the situation. The real problem is building a coalition to take away authority from state/local governments. It's hard to get republicans to say that state/local governments shouldn't have authority over the permitting process used for building wires in their jurisdiction. That's a quintessentially state/local issue. And it's hard to get democrats to say that state/local governments shouldn't be able to use these processes to advance various social agendas.
It's just a microcosm of a bigger problem, which is that while our federal government has joined with the rest of the world in deregulating large spheres of the economy, our state/local governments are hopelessly backwards, and for the most part Congress can't do anything about that. I was just in Tokyo and the loose zoning laws meant that even space under freeway overpasses was being utilized for stores and shops. You're just not allowed to do that sort of thing in the U.S.
So, with efforts past and efforts abandoned having failed to produce meaningful competition among ISPs... our response is to enlarge the market space in which monopoly power can be abused?
First: meaningful competition for the telecoms. Only then, does it make sense to even consider rolling back Net Neutrality.
And if deregulation is powerless to introduce telecom competition, who can blame people for turning to more aggressive last mile unbundling instead?
It's always easier to do what big telecom wants. So we have action on "deregulating" Net Neutrality which allows the telecoms to further leverage their local monopoly power, but no action which might actually put those monopolies in danger of real competition.