At this point I don't really believe consumers can win, just loose less. Sure competition is good... but you have issues like who owns the lines, and how do you allow competitors to use them? Surely running 7 different sets of utility lines down the street isn't really a good way to go. Now assuming we get past that, we still need heavy regulation and oversight to make sure those different companies are not in collusion and doing things like price fixing schemes.
Now lets say, we have a grid that is owned and maintained by your city/county/state who then leases that to X companies to serve the public... that could work maybe. But also, at that point why not just let the entity that controls the grid take care of the service? The only question then, is a state run monopoly better or worse than a sanctioned private monopoly?
If we apply the same scenario to ISP, where instead of power grid, we have some government entity in charge of installing and maintaining fibre... we might have a snowballs chance in catching up to other developed nations. We already see that most ISP can't be bothered to do it. I am sure they are quite content collecting $50/mo for 7-15mbps on minimally maintained copper their great grandfathers laid while throttling that access for various activity/content types. Actually investing in their infrastructure might dip into the ceo's multimillion dollar salary after all!
