The US is simply going about this all wrong.

I'm from Australia but live in New York and luckily my building has access to 2 providers (TWC and FIOS). My previous building only had TWC.

The problem with having a monopoly over providing retail Internet access is, well, that you have a monopoly. This is what infuriates me about the position of cable companies demanding Netflix pay to "push" bytes onto their networks.

No one is pushing anything. The customers of cable companies are _paying_ for Internet access and using that bandwidth to access services on the Internet that include Netflix.

The only reason cable companies even care is because Netflix provides competition to cable TV.

This situation can only exist because there are regional monopolies and for some reason the US just loves pretending regional monopolies are somehow "competition". Look at the Baby Bell situation as an earlier example.

In Australia, most people have only 1 physical option for fixed-line broadband, being Telstra, which was the government telco but has since been privatized. A few places also have cable Internet, typically over HFC, from Foxtel (owned by Telstra) or Optus.

I say "physical option" because the ACCC (Australian Competition and Consumer Commission; think of it like the FTC/FCC but without quite so much regulatory capture) some years ago forced Telstra to provide space in exchanges for rivals to put DSLAMs to provide ADSL service. Telstra receives income from this and tries their damndest to undermine this situation but the fact is you can get Internet from a bunch of providers because of it.

10+ years ago ADSL2+ was pretty decent. Now it's a tad archaic. Many people don't have >2Mbps due to distance from the exchange.

The US solution is to encourage overbuilds. This is not a good solution. For one, it's a waste to deploy so many networks. For another, providers will cherry pick areas leaving many with still a single provider.

What you need is forced separation of retail and wholesale. I think the Australian example provides good evidence for this.

Wholesalers need to be denied the ability to sell to retail customers and they need to provide the same terms to all retailers.

The previous government in Australia brought in the NBN (Next generation Broadband Network), which was to be FTTH for the vast majority of Australians. Deployment was slow and only a few areas got hooked up. Despite what anyone says, the cost was going to be way more than the government quoted (A$42B originally). The new government has essentially decided on a mix of technologies, being FTTH, HFC and FTTN.

FTTN is fiber to a box in the street and then copper cable the rest of the way. With VDSL2, you can probably get to 100Mbps this way. Recent trials of G.Fast have I think raised this to 1Gbps. So it's not a terrible solution. It's certainly not FTTH however.

There is antitrust precedent for forced separation of services, like the Hollywood Antitrust case of 1948 [1]. This separated studios, distributors and theaters.

I don't know if Title II is the answer here either. US regulation has been pretty terrible (eg the breakup of AT&T into the Baby Bells).

Still, most people do have one electricity provider and utility rules do prevent them from price gouging since electricity, gas and water are essential services. I believe that Internet access will be---or arguably already is--an essential service in much the same way.

Whatever the case, building more networks is a pretty terrible solution to the problem.

[1] US vs Paramount Pictures Inc. (1948), http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_Pict....