I'm a bit late to the party but I wanted to sort of do a different tack on this. The bottom line is that all this was talked about, by smart people, in the years leading up to the 1996 telecommunications act. People far smarter than us hashed all this out and every argument here was repeated there.
"The Plan" -- the core of "The Plan" -- then was to decouple infrastructure from services. At the time, the oligopoly of telcos and media companies still thought their cloud was enough to maintain their strategic advantage (or anti-competitive advantage) and one of the big concessions offered by the government, beyond just public funding for private infrastructure, was access to more wireless bandwidth.
They even talked about how we should have wireless phones that could do many many different frequencies and how awesome it would be if we decoupled the wireless infrastructure from wireless providers.
From a strictly utilitarian point of view, it DOES make sense that municipalities only build one set of wired infrastructure.
It might be fun to have cities that ran fiber and see how the different companies doing different services over the same fiber could get along.
Instead of 'inventing' new things.. My view is that we ought to move backwards along the timeline since this path is broken. Backtrack in other words. Make no mistake -- Title II's provisions are onerous. But that's the great thing and the point everyone is missing. The FCC can say 'hey, we're not going to hold everyone to X' And that's legal. What's not legal is for the FCC to say 'hey, follow rule X we just made up' -- that's why Comcast/Verizon sued. And won. The FCC has no power to make laws.. only to enforce them. Title II is a super minor blip 'backwards' on this timeline that might, maybe, make these companies say 'oh crap, we'd better do as they ask or they're going to turn the screws'
If someone looked at this with a 10 or 20 year perspective, one would find the level of manipulation and subterfuge from these entities goes well beyond any antitrust or anticompetitive behavior. That's the problem -- this debate is not reasonable.
the move from title II to title I about 10-15 years ago was 30 minutes of paperwork. Ostensibly, the move back is 30 minutes of paperwork, too. Once that's done it's what the FCC elects to enforce that determines the level of screw-turning that happens on these companies. Right now, essentially, they're squealing like a stuck pig over what is essentially not even a direct threat -- it's merely the threat of threats that actually carry some weight.
Consider that tomorrow the entire cable industry could die. Overnight HBO and every other content creator switches to a direct-to-consumer model. That cuts out cable companies as middlemen and that, truly, is the reason these companies are so terrified and are acting in such bad faith.
When you look at it from this perspective and you realize that distribution of things like "Jersey Shore" has resulted in so much profit for these companies that they are terrified of losing that revenue stream, you will weep for society.