[slightlycuban]

We're trying. Our not-too-far-off alternative is to require whoever owns the physical cable within the city to sell services to other providers (usually for a regulated fee).

Basically what we did for long-distance phone service. The recent FCC ruling stopped short of doing just that, but it isn't a stretch of the imagination for the FCC to apply full teleco rules to cable providers in the US.

Of course, every ISP is going to lobby extremely hard against that. But one can only hope...