I guess Senators suffer from the same problems as software engineers - they only see the problems in their living room.
In my largish apartment complex, there is one cable provider: Cox. I can't use a sat dish, my apartment faces the wrong direction and I'm on the second floor. FIOS isn't available. CenturyLink agrees no "prism tv" whatever that is for me, and directtv is out because I am on the second floor and face the wrong direction.
So there's really no free market in cable providers for me, it's a monopoly situation.
The free market solution would be to require Cox to allow other cable providers to use their cable to get last mile to me and then let Cox, et. al., charge me however they wish.
I would be curious to know which situation Cox would prefer: mandatory unbundling, or force them to share the cable.
EDIT: I do wonder what keeps Verizon from offering FIOS if they wanted to. Is it too expensive to rewire a huge sprawling multi-floor apartment complex?
My understanding is that Verizon has dramatically slowed their FiOS rollout, primarily because they don't think they're likely to be able to sell you "premium services" long-term. Does anyone think that within 10 years there will be any content worth having not available over a 100Mbit (or gigabit, even) pure IP connection? How much can Verizon expect to charge for such a connection?
FiOS made sense when they thought they would be Skype, HBO, NetFlix and iTunes combined, or at least get a cut on all of those. But even if we don't get regulated Network Neutrality, competitive pressure alone will commoditize content and application delivery over IP.
The result would be that Verizon could stop giving a crap about whether you use their TV offerings or Hulu or whatever else because that's not where they make their money, but at the same time customers wanting the "triple play" package can get it from them for a total price competitive with similarly situated ISPs and with an overall profit margin they expect from such a thing. Just admit to themselves that they're in the wire business, stop trying to be in the content business, and charge accordingly for the wire. Suddenly "cord cutters" are not a problem, especially when the competing ISP realizes the logic and does the same thing.
Compare the revenues or market cap of Skype or Hulu to that of Verizon FiOS, and then realize that both Skype and Hulu have more customers than FiOS, and ask yourself which business you'd rather be in. Infrastructure operators selling over the top services is just an invitation for them to interfere with competitors -- let the over the top market be competitive (and therefore have very small margins) and take the margins from the infrastructure where you can hold on to them. Look up "one monopoly rent" theory. If they're going to have a monopoly and collect monopoly rents, just let them do it in the monopoly market and not have to lose the benefits of competition in the over the top market merely in order to claim the same overall margins spread out over more products. It actually seems to be Pareto optimal -- who is going to lose out here? Maybe the cord cutters, but they're doing something which is unsustainable at scale unless what I'm proposing ends up happening. So where's the drawback?
This is exactly the sort of regulation Republicans should care about.
Not that this excuses Republicans from being hypocrites. But on this issue, there's no conflict with their core philosophy.
And frankly, even deregulating the financial industry was consistent with their philosophy. It was their support for socializing what should have been private losses that was the philosophical problem.
This is where every liberal/conservative rolls there eyes in disgust.