It could just as easily be the case that nobody's going to put however many dollars into building out a nationwide infrastructure that's completely dependent on

It could just as easily be the case that nobody's going to put however many dollars into building out a nationwide infrastructure that's completely dependent on future goodwill from Comcast et al, in light of their current behavior. Maybe I'm just an optimist, but I think Level3 wins here just because most people have no idea who they are or what the 'internet backbone' is. "My netflix is slow!" => Netflix's problem. "My internet is slow!" => Cable company's problem.