That's just part of the reason. The real question is did deregulation actually decrase prices and increase competition as was promised? Here (Ontario) we had o

That's just part of the reason. The real question is did deregulation actually decrase prices and increase competition as was promised? Here (Ontario) we had one telephone company and one cable company prior to deregulation. The telephone company (Bell Canada) was very tightly regulated. While telephone service wasn't necessarily the least expensive in the world, it was very reliable and at least ten years ahead of what was being offered in the US. By virtue of their rapid conversion to a fullly digital network, made possible by their partnership with Nortel, services like ISDN, the precursor to DSL, were reltively cheap and readaily available. I knew people in Silicon Valley in the late 1990s that could not, for no amount of money, get anything faster than dial-up. Local telecom providers, of which there were many, were all using obsolete equipment and had terrible infrastructure. At the same time in Ontario anyone could get dual-channel ISDN for around $50/mo. After deregulation here there was a little bit of competition, but then, like the US, the market quickly stabilized into a live and let live state where nobody wants to compete with anyone else for fear of retribution. Cellular service packages are suspiciously identical in terms of features and pricing. Since they're de-regulated there's little we can do. We can't force them to fix their pricing. We can't force them to compete. We can't tell them to do a damned thing they don't already want to do. Now Bell Canada is too busy being a media company, it owns a bunch of television stations, to care about anything other than profit. There was an opportunity there to keep them regulated and have a neutral, non-discriminatory network provider, but that ship has long since sailed.