> There's lot's of places that don't have FIOS now, but those folks also didn't have DSL in the late 1990's.
That's not true at all! Most people who had cable and/or DSL in the late 1990s/early 2000s don't have FIOS today!
> The average U.S. connection, according to Akamai, is 10 mbps. That's a huge increase over what it was even 10 years ago.
Yes, Comcast has spent lots of money in expanding access to new regions, since that's the only way they can acquire new customers. They don't care about customer retention (their customers have no other choices), so they don't need to do much (if anything) to improve service to existing customers. The stagnation you're talking about has already happened.
> Not everyone has so many choices, but I think the folks that don't have many choices today had even fewer choices back in the day.
In almost all of the towns near where I grew up, the choices available today are a strict subset of the choices available in the 2000s, except at massively increased prices[0].
> Heavy regulation of the sort that's appropriate for a power company is not appropriate for an industry where we expect private companies to invest billions a year in keeping up with new technologies.
All that says is that the exact mandates of the regulation would need to differ, which I would agree is true. That doesn't mean that they shouldn't be regulated as a utility at all.
As I said before, the stagnation you're talking about has already happened.
[0] Again, I'm not counting LTE as an option, because that's not viable as a primary means to access the Internet in 2014, and is unlikely to be so anytime soon.
That's not true at all! Most people who had cable and/or DSL in the late 1990s/early 2000s don't have FIOS today!
> The average U.S. connection, according to Akamai, is 10 mbps. That's a huge increase over what it was even 10 years ago.
Yes, Comcast has spent lots of money in expanding access to new regions, since that's the only way they can acquire new customers. They don't care about customer retention (their customers have no other choices), so they don't need to do much (if anything) to improve service to existing customers. The stagnation you're talking about has already happened.
> Not everyone has so many choices, but I think the folks that don't have many choices today had even fewer choices back in the day.
In almost all of the towns near where I grew up, the choices available today are a strict subset of the choices available in the 2000s, except at massively increased prices[0].
> Heavy regulation of the sort that's appropriate for a power company is not appropriate for an industry where we expect private companies to invest billions a year in keeping up with new technologies.
All that says is that the exact mandates of the regulation would need to differ, which I would agree is true. That doesn't mean that they shouldn't be regulated as a utility at all.
As I said before, the stagnation you're talking about has already happened.
[0] Again, I'm not counting LTE as an option, because that's not viable as a primary means to access the Internet in 2014, and is unlikely to be so anytime soon.