> I would love to see a world where the companies that own last-mile infrastructure are required to lease the lines to any ISP the end consumer wants; this woul

> I would love to see a world where the companies that own last-mile infrastructure are required to lease the lines to any ISP the end consumer wants; this would create a competitive market and mostly eliminate the problem This is not enough. In Germany we already do have that situation, and the big leader (German Telekom, who own the vast majority of cables) just leases them for bad conditions. For example, their own customers got "real" flatrates while leasing competitors got only traffic-based contracts, so when they sell flatrates they have big trouble with traffic-intensive customers. (In the last year, the situation became more complicated, but that's another topic). We should go one step further and require a complete separation of infrastructure providers, ISPs and content providers. That is, a company who owns cables should only lease them to ISPs and should not be allowed to play ISP itself. Also, the ISPs should not be allowed offer content themselves. (Also, the owner of the infrastructure (cables) should probably not be a company at all, but that's another topic and not important here, as long as the separation works.) As a bad analogy, a company who sells cars should not own the streets.