> You can't compare utility companies with tech companies.

You can't compare telecom companies with utility companies. Utility companies get to go to a rate board and raise prices until they're ensured a profit. Their profit source is far more stable.

> Selling a business unit doesn't tell you anything about how well it's doing

It's hard for me to hang out on HN, and read all the news about acquisitions and divestitures, and come to the conclusion that companies are in the habit of selling profitable business units that have room for growth. I don't think that's the most treasonable conclusion to draw from the evidence.

> GTE was a conglomerate with among other things a large wireless business with a lot of highly valuable radio spectrum

Note also that Verizon invested $7 billion in building FiOS in these states. Even if you value the wireless assets as the bulk of the GTE deal, it's still not clear that Verizon made their money back when you add together their investment in FiOS + what they paid for those customers originally.

> That's assuming DSL customers are worth the same amount as FiOS customers, which is obviously wrong.

The tech-media narrative is that these companies have incredibly valuable monopolies over customers, and that telcos don't build fiber because these monopolies allow them to make almost as much money milking DSL customers. If that narrative were true, a FiOS customer shouldn't be worth a lot less than a DSL customer in a sale, because what's being sold is the valuable monopoly over the customer.

Back of the envelope calculation, assuming the value of a voice : DSL : FiOS customer is 1 : 2 : 6. That still values a FiOS customer at ~$3,500.

> If tomorrow they're paying $100 to Frontier for internet and $20 to Netflix for TV instead of paying $120 to Verizon for internet+TV, they'll barely even notice the difference. And it's not like you can subscribe to Netflix without internet service.

You're assuming that Frontier can raise prices to $100 for internet-only service. What I'm asserting is that if they could, they already would have!

If cable companies had arbitrary pricing power, and could increase their internet-only rates to nearly their internet+TV rate without losing customers, then Netflix isn't even a threat to them. So the whole angle of "net neutrality is necessary to keep cable cable companies from strangling Netflix" would be predicated on the idea that cable companies don't have a rational understanding of their pricing power.

> That's what they should be doing anyway.

Look at what's happened with Verizon's previous three divestitures. Two went bankrupt, and Frontier's stock has tanked from the third and never recovered. Frontier across the board reduced speeds. All indications are that Frontier not only does not intend to keep investing capital in its FiOS network, it intends to cut back on the core network backing it. The business will continue to run, but with greatly reduced levels of capital investment because it's just not worthwhile to invest more when it's not very profitable.

> You're not actually solving the problem.

I'm not posing a solution, I'm asking what Google Fiber can teach us about the economics of building telecom infrastructure. Does it make sense to invest all that money if you can't make money off the content side? And even if we assume Google would never do anything bad, if their core search/online services business was ever threatened by competitors, don't the market dynamics give them a strong incentive to leverage their network against that threat?