Startup opportunity?
We don't have duopolies in internet throughout most of the country by accident or because no one has noticed. It's because it's illegal to operate otherwise.
I know people who have started local ISP's in the US (10+ years ago, not recently, because it's hard to get into the market now for business reasons) -- they needed no FCC license. Although, yes, by renting fiber from the teleco's not by running their own. But that's a capital issue, and a right-to-run-fiber-through-the-public-way issue (permission from muncipality, as you note), not an FCC issue.
I'm not sure what you're referring to.
Basically, there's often a tacit (or even explicit) understanding that the winner of a bid to supply cable or Internet services to a municipal area will have the exclusive right to do so (mainly, the service providers argue, to make the capital investment involved in supply said services worth it).
There has been a long-running debate over whether or not last-mile networks and local cable are natural monopolies - i.e., whether or not it is most efficient for the industry to have a monopoly. If such services are public utilities with high capital costs, service providers might argue, they should have the exclusive rights to sales in an area.
In fact, it got so bad that the Supreme Court said that municipalities could be guilty of antitrust violations if they explicitly gave monopoly power to such providers (see Community Communications Co. v. City of Boulder).
So municipalities and service providers moved to implicit guarantees of monopoly - RFP processes that are hard for less-well-resourced companies to win, for example. [1] What I'd like to know is whether or not these implicit guarantees are still a problem.
Some states (like North Carolina) set up a 'franchising' process for service providers to get the right to serve an area. So it's not always just about permission from the municipality. It might be about whether or not your state's equivalent of a franchising process is exclusive on the local level. For cable, North Carolina's is supposedly non-exclusive, though I wonder how many times Time Warner runs into trouble getting approve to serve an area, and whether they end up developing small natural monopolies in some locations. But regardless of whether or not those monopolies develop, you have to think about who gets to run lines on whose land.
The fact is that the big companies have an easier time running lines for any data/media service (cable, Internet, etc) through easements and public areas. (This is the part some people refuse to believe. 'Oh, but anybody can purchase land!' Sure, but do you have the capital to do that, or does Time Warner?)
A truly competitive market would involve setting up the infrastructure and having the public own that, instead of owning or operating actual ISPs, which, to any rational observer, constitutes unfair competition, even in light of the desperate need for competition in some markets.
States and municipalities would hand out licenses to the infrastructure, not to the land. That'd be really cool, and possibly really efficient.
[1] - http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa034.html (Good summary of the debate; pretty fair)
But it's got nothing to do with any "FCC licenses", as the post I was replying to said, there aren't any involved.
(Slightly more feasible practically, although still capital-intensive, would be starting your own over-the-air ISP with blanket wifi or point-to-point microwaves or whatever, I don't know the tech details, but THEN you've possibly got FCC licenses involved!)
In most places in the US the telephone poles and utility conduits are generally owned by the telephone or electric company. You need to lease pole space from them, and those leases aren't cheap. There have been several municipal WiFi initiatives that got alot of press, but later died because they couldn't afford to rent the pole access.
In higher-density areas, there are alternatives. For example, in Albany, NY a small telco provider worked with the city to provide municipal wifi and public safety networking using traffic lights, city buildings, and streetlights (which are owned by the city). The problem with that model is that you get good coverage in central business districts and avenues, but nothing on residential blocks.
You have duopolies because the Bell System was the one and only phone company, and the Feds have basically allowed SBC/AT&T and Verizon to bring that back. Phone companies didn't "get" IP networks in the 90's and early 2000's, and decided to just milk the aging out POTS network as long as possible and ask for government handouts later. Cable companies evolved differently from community co-ops (Ars Technica has a few good stories about this) and tend to operate in a model where they get a franchise agreement that gives them a monopoly in a city or town. So now you have highly regulated, dumb telcos and lesser regulated cable companies who negotiate sweetheart deals with dumb municipal governments.