Gotta kick one out to make room for the other. New York isn't about to let every ISP in the nation run independent lines over all of the poles in the state.
The good thing is that when the replacement company steps up (or wins the bid), it will know that the state is serious about keeping obligations.
OTOH, this might be when we find out just how much collusion there is between the big companies, if none decide to fill the gap, thus putting pressure on the AG from the voters.
Why not? I would expect the barrier to entry there to be the expense of doing so, not regulatory refusal.
It makes sense for a regulator to require "universal" coverage and prohibit cherry-picking only the profitable areas, which brings the cost barrier back into focus. However, encouraging a monopology would seem to encourage a similar result.
Has the state actually expressed or implied such a policy?
A quick GIS of telephone poles in India or Thailand will provide you an answer.
To whit, I believe you're presenting a false dichotomy between monopoly and completely unregulate free-for-all.
People don't want massive bunches of cable lines running through their neighborhoods. Most people don't even like the few they have unless they're underground and there aren't access pillars every hundred feet.
Voters aren't going to let regulators ugly up their neighborhoods and drive their home values down.
Mostly, I'm trying to determine if your assertion was a speculation based on, say, evidence (either from NYS previous behavior or from another jurisdiction), or strictly your intuition or guesswork.
So far, I've only seen the latter. My own intuition is this has nothing to do with voters and everything to do with legislators and administrative regulators, over whom voters have only a vague influence and only after deals like this are already done.
Even so, do you even have anything to back up your claim that voters (and most of them, at that) care about additional cables on utility poles, especially in New York State (and not just something that shows people merely prefer underground utilities to pole-mounted, which is undisputed)?