In very old industries you often have players who have a monopolistic status. Markets either become price efficient or competition deficient over time. In the c

In very old industries you often have players who have a monopolistic status. Markets either become price efficient or competition deficient over time. In the case of telecom there is stratified warfare. At the consumer level, competition is scarce. In the SMB Segment competition is fierce. In the Datacenters world competition is fierce, but at the core of everything you have to go through 721 Folsom street to get out of the left coast. This fight is particularly interesting because it's one of the first to cross the Commercial-Residential boundary. On the one hand, consumers pay for access, on the other, large ISPs peer networks. One is a contract, the other a handshake. In this particular case, ISPs argue that since usage increases so should rates, but in order to arrive at such a conclusion, the large ISPs would have to ignore their monopoly. Let's take this a step further though; there's a really big problem with everyone building their own network. That is, no one wants thousands of wires running to each residence, but that's what a competitive last mile would look like. The answer is municipally controlled networks with private operators. The infrastructure would be owned by the state, but operated by competitive virtual operators. Unfortunately, this vision is impossible in America, and that's why we can't tackle this problem straight-on and instead have to operate through layers of abstraction. TL;DR: public networks, private operators is ideal. Impossible in US.