C'mon man, I post reliably enough on this topic that you know I'm not a "proponent of regulation". I'm the one who wants to see FCC shuttered completely. Let radio device manufacturers regulate themselves like they already do perfectly well in the wifi bands. ("But, but, long-distance interference!" Really? You were talking about millimeter wave. That's on the other side of wifi: why does that need regulation?) Failing that, let's have the advertised spirit of the 1996 Act, rather than its woeful intent and implementation.

I would love to believe this vision of 5G you offer, of enough competition to actually change the character of internet access in USA. I love to imagine that innovation supported by ever smaller and more numerous connected devices might someday be possible. I love that on the wired side I can hire e.g. Jive or one of its many competitors for my business phone system and Netflix or one of its many competitors for personal entertainment. That services are not tied to the network is a basic internet design principle. Yet even in wired I still have to pay more for a data connection alone than for a data connection plus some stupid local phone or TV connection. (The only exceptions are where a local municipality has had the vision to defend local interests.) Wireless, of course, is much worse, e.g. with MNOs overcharging average users so as to subsidize whoever is using the favored online-service-of-the-month. I know they're overcharging because if I sign up with MVNO Ting I get the same service for less than half the price. Marketing is expensive, but so is buying FCC. Also yes I took Ec 10 and several additional courses; I don't require reminding that "moat" is a euphemism for "barrier to entry".

It's telling that when speculating about new entrants, you come up with... Comcast and Google. Well yes these giant oligopolistic firms will continue to exist as such. That isn't exactly a wave of entrepreneurial investment like that we saw in the late 1990s. Investors learned from that debacle. When you pour many billions into a marketplace the regulator of which has been owned by one actor for six decades, that actor will end up with most of your investment. It will take a few decades for investors to forget that lesson. Sure, it's nice for backbone customers that long-distance data is still overbuilt even now. Somehow that doesn't help the average last-mile consumer.

How do I know? What am I talking about? In a previous stage of my career I worked for both CLECs and ILECs. I've seen the change orders dropped on the floor by the hundreds, for no reason that VZN or SBC even cared to lie about. The entire UNE program, a centerpiece of the 1996 act, was a sham from the start. The incumbents were never held to any level of service at any level of interconnection, eventually their competitors just ran out of money, and they swept up the infrastructure and customer base for pennies on the dollar. ATT and VZN have used this windfall to dominate spectrum auctions and so inevitably the wireless market. They compete with each other as hard as e.g. Mastercard and Visa, about what one would expect from Ma Bell's two daughters. "Broadband investment" is a bizarre metric to even mention, when discussing a captured regulator of generations-old monopolistic firms. How did they afford that buildout? They let investors in victim firms pay for it.

It is possible that the various parties who have been doing the same thing, in different guises, for 84 years will do something different in the near future. It is possible that in introducing 5G they are making a mistake on the order of allowing the microwave oven in the ISM band. Viewed over the long run, it just doesn't seem very likely. What seems more likely is that they will continue harvesting monopoly rents and spending some small portion of those rents on keeping their regulator captured and their customers without options. There are procedures for sharing pole space, and FCC has just put municipalities on notice that they will keep their thumb on that scale too.