I always feel left out of this conversation . It seems to be either you ' re in favor of monopolies controlling the market and refusing to compete or you fully support this idea that the government should be doing something more to stop it by laying out monopolysupporting regulations . It ' s a completely false dichotomy . That ' s how thoroughly these companies are entrenched . The proposed solution doesn ' t actually stop the monopolies , just tells them what to do . I want more competition . I want better service . But I don ' t think the answer is to control what a company can charge you for . The answer isn ' t to take a private industry and call it a utility , declaring what they can or cannot charge customers . The answer is to say that they wont be allowed to make contracts with local government for sole provider agreements . That they wont be allowed to own the only service poles on public easements and pretend to abide by pole usage agreements with the other companies . If anything about this situation needs to be controlled by the government to be fixed , it would be that those poles and trenches for service lines are on public easements and still somehow not open for any company that wants to use them . The government should declare the easements the utility and maybe even have a maintenance system for them that companies pay a tax for using but don ' t control . This situation of monopolies and antitrust is completely remedied by refusing to use the government to pick a winner and instead using the government to provide the playing field . Google fiber would be everywhere right now , and who knows how many other companies trying to earn your business , if the government wasn ' t already supporting these entrenched monopolies by letting them control public space for private gains . But none of that seems to matter to people . Either you support net neutrality telling the monopolies what they can charge you for , or you support the monopolies running amok . Net neutrality doesn ' t fix that these companies have a monopoly on the means of providing service . It just theoretically prevents them from double dipping on service fees . And probably by the time it was finished being implemented those monopolies would be even more secure , with competition even further barred from reaching you . How about we stop giving companies billions of dollars for promises of service quality , and instead use that money to create a feasible system of easement and right of way for companies to use for fiber laying . How about we stop making soleprovider contacts that completely prevent competition . How about we stop pretending that net neutrality is the answer to monopolies when it doesn ' t remove them and only tries to tell them what to do .