If the Googles and Facebooks of the world don't want to abide by the terms set by the Comcasts of the world, they should build their own networks. If there are regulatory barriers to doing that, those should be the target of regulatory reform.
Because its not a freely competitive market. They didn't acquire the infrastructure and access -- particularly the last mile access -- by freely negotiating with property owners, nor, even if they had, is there unlimited capacity for new competitors to do so. Incumbent major broadband providers all got the basic access essential to provide infrastructure as CATV and telephone providers, as locally or regionally regulated monopolies, and there is pretty much no way for direct competition with fixed broadband providers on equal footing.
Fixed broadband providers aren't an ideal market for the same reason "road providers" or "sewer service providers" aren't.
> If the Googles and Facebooks of the world don't want to abide by the terms set by the Comcasts of the world, they should build their own networks.
Google's been working very hard on that for many years, because they knew that their preferred regulatory framework wasn't something that they could count on.
OTOH, I don't see why the Comcasts and AT&Ts of the world now ought to be free to capture all the profit from business done over the internet any more than the AT&Ts of the telephone age were allowed to do so for all business done over the telephone.
The monopoly condition and the public position they had with it is how they acquired a lot of the permanent property rights (easements, etc.) necessary for the infrastructure. That advantage doesn't ever go away, even if the regulated monopoly status does.
And it doesn't change the fact that wireline broadband, because of the physical access requirements, is inherently not a kind of service for which a real competitive free market is possible, for the same reason that it isn't with road networks or sewer systems or electric power delivery.
The value is a substantial barrier to entry to competition -- why even Google Fiber, backed by the vast stockpiles of cash at Google, is often seen as a risky proposition against the entrenched providers and why you see very few providers of actual connections (as opposed to resellers) to those who have access developed as CATV or telephone monopolies.
Exactly this. To me, it ceases being a property rights issue when the rights given to the carriers were not granted under market conditions to begin with.
Does that give the government the ability to impose on the carriers whatever it wants in an arbitrary fashion? No. But it does mean that there should be some elasticity in terms of regulatory structure.
How so? Buying a big ISP and expanding it seems like an odd way to do so.
The ARPANET project was great, but expanding it to homes was never in the plans.