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The first is that a legislature can't easily bind its future self - laws passed by a majority can be repealed by a majority or circumvented by a majority in the future.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saying what you said, there's nothing stopping a 2015 (or 2020 or whenever) law from saying "Law 2014-003 is hereby repealed" or more narrowly "Law 2014-003 doesn't apply to this law".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.
