One of the positives I see here is that if the doomsday scenarios come to pass, it might actually enable competition to emerge. There's certainly lots of artif

One of the positives I see here is that if the doomsday scenarios come to pass, it might actually enable competition to emerge. There's certainly lots of artificial barriers to entry to competition, but Google managed to overcome these in a number of regions. Yet somehow Google Fiber was ultimately a failure. It's already been downsizing and put all further expansion plans on hold. So what happened? You could write a novel there, but the most basic point is that not enough people signed up. After 5 years of operation Google managed a whopping 68,715 television subscribers and 453,000 broadband subscribers. They found that in poorer neighborhoods people would, inexplicably, not even sign up for the free option! That factoid alone, which is really hard to even conceive of, I think emphasizes how much of a bubble we all, including Google, live in. They responded by sending out grants to digital literacy groups. Nobody seems to really like Comcast/Time Warner, yet people apparently are not sufficiently incentivized to swap carriers when the possibility arises. If the doomsday scenarios do come to pass, this could hopefully change. Ultimately the power is with the people, but most are not yet willing to speak with their wallet. The time when things will finally change is when this happens, or when a new competitor (perhaps satellite/balloon internet) enters the picture.