Technology

The right people greasing the right palms.

Three words: Open widespread corruption.

You see back in the days it used to be Bell Systems (AT&T) that ran a huge vertical monopoly on telecommunications. Being the peak of some major consumers rights cases around that time, Bell was split up into like 7 different companies to free the market in a very big anti trust case.

AT&T of course has clawed its way back to the top, but it avoids anti trust cases by not holding an outright monopoly. Their argument is "Yeah but there's also comcast", ie an oligopoly.

An oligopoly, which is still very bad, is not a monopoly, so congress continues to take huge funding bribes which we call lobbying, and let both AT&T and Comcast do whatever they want so long as no one company takes over.

Both company execs and shareholders get rich and go home to sleep on a big pile of money, while you as the consumer curse out both for their crappy prices and overwhelming control.

Oh and AT&T wastes government funds on not expanding fiber networks because they can earn the same amount without caring about the consumer because no alternative other than maybe Comcast exists with a superior service or offer.

Because of the consumer surplus anti-trust paradigm. Comcast just needs to say that prices are as low as they would be in a more competitive environment. And cable companies in regional cable markets can tacitly collude simply by matching competitor prices. Thus, how do you prove that prices are actually too high and that Comcast and other cable companies are using their market power to abuse consumers? You can't.

Lina Khan, the American hero that she is, is trying to pursue an old anti-trust paradigm.

The thing with last-mile ISPs is that it doesn't make sense for 6 different companies to lay fiber optic in the same neighborhood.

In that case, socialized infrastructure is the better solution.