[thomasfortes]

Would you like to have 30 different companies digging your street to lay cables?

Or 10 energy cables over your street because energy competition would be great?

Even in a perfect world, infrastructure is a natural monopoly.

The government could handle all the big scale infrastructure and let small players handle the last mile, but that's not the case and even if it was, people would still complain.

[waterhouse]

If people accept 1 company doing it, would 2, or even 3 or 4, be so bad? Whatever rules limit it currently could be relaxed instead of eliminated completely; competition-wise, going from 1 to 2 is a much larger step than going from 5 to 10. Regarding power—as a matter of fact, I've had some power outages recently. I think 2 would provide some nice redundancy.

[thomastjeffery]

New businesses do not necessarily need to own the infrastructure. They just need bandwidth.

Competing businesses could even work together to improve existing infrastructure.

The problem is that existing monopolies do not dissipate without external pressure, because it is not to their benefit.

We have 6 monopolies now, and we need to actively break them up. Short of that, we need to regulate them.

[jlillyreed]

Existing businesses have many incentives to not give bandwidth on their infrastructure to their competition - especially at competitive prices

[betterunix2]

In some countries, and in the USA until 2005, the regulations require incumbent service providers to lease their infrastructure to competitors. France has such requirements, and unsurprisingly they pay less for their fiber optic service than Americans.

[thomastjeffery]

That is the heart of the problem.

[tripzilch]

How did you in the US ever manage to get cable TV everywhere?