Because there are laws on the books explicitly preventing anyone else from competing with Comcast.

Can anyone tell me what would be the problem with just having a law "no law is allowed to be passed preventing any individual or entity from providing broadband service to any other individual or entity"? And how said problem would be worse than the current dismal arrangements?

"Look I'm sorry mate but I'm just running this wire through your house to give your neighbor internet, if you don't let me you're in the wrong"

"Sorry but we need to tear up this highway and disrupt traffic for the next couple of weeks to lay some fibre. I know someone else did the same thing last week but they were another company and it's illegal for the local government body to stop any of us laying stuff on public land when we want"

Obviously that extreme is untenable. You may be after something a bit more useful like unbundling, but in the US you have to explain how forcing a private company to let competitors use it's cable is not outright stalinistic communism.

There's a difference between not allowing ISPs access to public lands and outright prohibiting them from offering their services.

Obviously if they wanted to run wire through a house they'd have to get the owner's permission, or the local government's permission to dig up a road. The thing is, as the law currently stands they're forbidden from doing so; even if every household in they city signed a contract saying "sure, let company X run cable through our yard", company X still wouldn't be allowed to sell them internet over that cable.

Maybe a company could innovate and develop some form of fast wireless mesh network. But even if they had the technology and finances to do so, local laws stating "the only company allowed to sell fast internet here is Comcast" or equivalent prevent them from doing so.

There are two issues with this. There are also MASSIVE incentive issues with this (lobbying, etc) but in this comment I'll only discuss legal issues:

The first is that a legislature can't easily bind its future self - laws passed by a majority can be repealed by a majority or circumvented by a majority in the future. So even if we pass Law 2014-003 saying what you said, there's nothing stopping a 2015 (or 2020 or whenever) law from saying "Law 2014-003 is hereby repealed" or more narrowly "Law 2014-003 doesn't apply to this law". There are some edge cases where you can pull it off but by and large it'd take a state/federal constitutional amendment.

The second issue is that the federal government can only regulate "interstate commerce". While you'd think that anything involving the Internet would automatically apply there, you couldn't stop a state law that covered only a local business dealing with in-state customers. So such a law could be used as a shield for Verizon/Comcast/etc while state laws restricting ISPs would only apply to smaller in-state competitors. My parents and a number of my friends are served by a local Wireless ISP because that's the only alternative in their neck of the (literal) woods. Under your system, their ISP could be subject to innumerable regulations that Verizon/Comcast would be immune to.

I'd have thought a state granted monopoly is something Americans would oppose strongly enough to prevent such laws? O.o

Yeah fucking right. Just look at US patent law.

In the UK BT is required by law to provide access to their fibre at a wholesale price to enable competition. At least that is my understanding.

Why not require something similar?

We do ... for landline telephone service. The telecomm companies had to put up with that for so long that when other communications services started seeing demand, they did what they could to lobby away similar regulation for internet access.

What it boils down to in most places is that internet access is not (legally) a public utility and therefore skirts public utility regulation.

Simply because US ISPs have spent millions of $$ on lobbyists to avoid precisely this.

> Seems like a natural place to put "click here to contact your state/federal representative"

How does that solve anything, though?

Judging by the lack of competition, it seems it's not profitable to compete.

Now, you could force Comcast to lease out its network capacity to competing companies, but this is really a shortsighted solution: the consequence is that potential competitors, who are contemplating establishing competing last-mile connectivity, cannot make a solid calculation to see if it would be profitable, because it might risk being forced to lease out the network capacity it establishes, thus it avoids doing so.

The problem here is simple: digging down cables is expensive. No amount of legislation is going to change that. The real solution is reducing the cost of the last mile connection. This might be possible through opening up legislation (removing barriers to entry), though. Like opening up more wireless frequencies, to carrier last mile traffic to consumers.

>Judging by the lack of competition, it seems it's not profitable to compete.

Nobody is allowed to compete. No company will be afforded the same benefits given to the first cable company that actually layed the physical infrastructure. Local governments give all kinds of benefits to the first company to bring in cable. They won't for the second. They will see it as wasteful duplication of infrastructure.

Companies should not be granted monopolies on the last mile lines that they were granted all kinds of exceptions for. Telephone companies seem to get by without it, why are we tolerating it for cable companies, especially when they are competing with services offered online?

Telephone companies did not get by without subsidies.

They weren't allowed a monopoly on the last mile.