[Zikes]

So the argument seems to be that the more money these companies believe they can make, the more likely they are to build infrastructure that will ultimately reduce the costs for consumers.

This is a highly idealized view, which does not mesh well with synonymous real world systems like cable TV and cell phone networks. Those two examples alone prove to me that these companies would prefer to collude to keep prices artificially high than to use their monopolistic infrastructures to provide cheap and high quality service to consumers.

Besides which, America has already paid $200 billion to these companies in the name of infrastructure improvement, and all they did with that was take the money and run.