Story

You seem to know more about this than I, but isn't it unfair to compare a nationwide network of AT&T and later RBOC maintained telco copper, on which POTS ISPs ran freely, with allowing/imposing competition on local evil cable company monopolies who all ran their own infrastructure and connected to each other and the Internet per se only as an afterthought to delivering TV?

It would be great if competition were there (and in a few cases there are things like Earthlink over Time Warner cable, thanks to legal settlements related to that merger) but it doesn't seem like the same thing as saying "there's already a national voice network and you can use modems on it to talk to the ISP of your choice". There just IS NO similar national network of cable infrastructure on top of which to run all these theoretical competing ISPs.... No?