The comparison is not apt; you seem to be invoking airlines in the belief that they are a similarly capital-intensive industry. This is not really true. You c

The comparison is not apt; you seem to be invoking airlines in the belief that they are a similarly capital-intensive industry. This is not really true. You can start up an airline with a bunch of rented or chartered planes, so you don't have to buy much of anything. (And even if you do want to buy them, investors know that they can be sold later and take that into account when loaning you money.) You can't really do that if you want to be a modern ISP. (At one point, due to line-sharing rules, you could be a DSL ISP without too much infrastructure investment, but this is no longer true; the rules were gutted a few years back and with them went most of the small mom-and-pop DSL operations.) It's a hell of a lot harder to get investment for a fiber deployment---which won't be worth much of anything if the business folds---than it is to buy an aircraft, which at the end of the day will still be a valuable asset. The industries in question have very little in common, so it should come as no surprise that strategies to induce competition within them look totally dissimilar as well.