I agree that reducing barriers is better, but in the USA it's unworkable. It requires haggling with a patchwork of thousands and thousands of state, county, and

I agree that reducing barriers is better, but in the USA it's unworkable. It requires haggling with a patchwork of thousands and thousands of state, county, and city governments and even things like homeowners' associations. Telecom networks also qualify as a natural monopoly to some extent. Allowing any startup to form a telecom and try to deploy their own infrastructure would look like this: https://news.lovepattayathailand.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/maxresdefault-8-1.jpg https://news.lovepattayathailand.com/wp-content/uploads/2017... The lowest hanging fruit for real deregulation and opening of the broadband market would be to get the FCC to nuke analog TV and open the UHF spectrum for last mile Internet access with a policy that is very pro-competition. For example they could limit TX power in some bands to no more than what it takes to get ~5km range and require some kind of minimal few-hundred-per-year license to use them in a given geo-region. That would allow anyone to start a last mile wireless ISP using commodity hardware and a single fiber uplink such as to a data center. But since this FCC is the definition of regulatory capture I highly doubt this will happen either. Pai and his FCC is completely in the pocket of entrenched telecoms and this kind of move would threaten them more than any kind of net neutrality regulation.