Anybody remember that the ISPs said, if we deregulated them in 1996, that by this time we'd all have 45 Mbps speed? Well, we don't. My own Pacbell spent billions and billions merging with SBC, and then AT&T, and changing their logos. And obviously, this sucked up a hundred billion or so -- money that might have gone to extending DSL to rural districts -- or making that last mile wireless. Or laying lots of really fast fiber. Of course, they had lots of time to lobby against municipal systems putting up free, or very cheap, WiFi.
The telcos have to face the fact that they do one thing: supply high-speed data, not POTS, to everyone in their territory. They do not supply content. They are common carriers. If they can't come up with the cash to bring us into the first tier of high-speed Internet, they're not going to finance themselves by choking the net and making deals so, if Yahoo pays them, they choke off Google. Uh-uh. Tim Berners-Lee, who developed the web, has come out very strongly against the ISPs attempts to alter the original design.
If the ISPs need some help, maybe government can invest in a little of the backbone. It's not AT&T's Internet. It's not Comcast's. It's ours.
Oh, and it would help if they were handing over records of all our calls to a legal program, not an unconstitutional power grab. But that's just me.