When people finally try to self-organize (e.g. municipal development projects), the oligopoly turns to lawsuits and lobbying to beat them down.
The U.S. is such a hypocritical country. We laud competition, while in actuality we beat it down with ever fewer but larger and more deadly sticks.
There's no beef to your argument. The telco oligopolies are the result of two simple factors:
1) Telecom is a field with almost infinite economics of scale, which means that the natural tendency is towards consolidation until there is only one company left. It's the textbook case of natural monopoly.
2) Most of the existing telecoms arose through government-sanctioned monopolies. Those monopolies didn't arise because lobbyists padded the right pockets. Those monopolies arose because rural areas dominate U.S. politics (their votes count about 2x as much when election districts are accounted for). As a result, governments go to huge lengths to make sure that utility providers don't do the most economically sensible thing of concentrating infrastructure in densely-populated areas. One of the measures is giving utilities monopoly rights in return for their servicing rural areas.
The fact that it takes something like Google to take on these interests is completely unsurprising. They are one of the few companies with the dollars to address (1). They are also targeting, so far, only Kansas City (not a megalopolis, but an urban area of 1.5 million people) and thereby dodging (2).
In fact, that probably explains the whole "Hey kids! Get your town to enter the Google Fiber Lucky City Sweepstakes!" that was used to roll Google Fiber out. The winning city bought into the fiber idea so hard that the next step of kicking out the franchise agreements would be a snap.
Lamenting about how political telecom can get is somewhat naive. Of course it's political. It involves digging up public/private property under municipal permission. It invokes the same contentious debates that all infrastructure projects invoke: richer neighborhoods versus poor one, urban ones versus rural ones, "not in my backyard," etc. As long as telecom involves digging up public land or using public spectrum, it will be intensely political.
The political tradeoff comes from the franchise agreement. Your citizens want cable tv, and Comcast only wants to wire up the higher-end neighborhoods because they'll buy more services. Is that how you want to be portrayed? So you tell Comcast to make the deal: wire up the whole town, even that neighborhood 3000 feet up the hill, and we'll guarantee that nobody else can interfere with your physical plant investment. Comcast sleeps soundly at night, and so do the politicians.
Every small town in Iowa, the biggest house in town? The cable franchise operator.
All of those things are done under municipal authority. You can grant Comcast an easement to wire up your house, but what about digging under public streets or across your neighbor's yard?
Also, I don't disagree with the second part, but a fair characterization includes the fact that those people up on that hill have twice the votes per capita as the people living downtown.
Absolute BS. Telecom lobbyists spend millions every year. I imagine they would stop if it were not necessary as you claim.
This is an interesting observation. In South Africa, Telkom, the state monopoly had its monopoly status extended in return for rolling out services to rural areas. What really happened was that cellphones rapidly overtook landlines, and the common perception is that most of the landlines have been stolen and used for copper (although that isn't entirely true, I think, our maid has a cheap line in a rural area). Telkom's monopoly has expired, and it is crumbling, but South African telecoms were set back significantly.
South Africa's telecoms law was written with much input from SBC, an American corporation that bought a stake in Telkom ( http://twentythirdfloor.co.za/2007/08/27/telkom-sbc-and-a-fe... ).
Although most think that there was a purely ulterior motive in granting the monopoly, your comment makes me wonder if they were trying to replicate the de facto American model.
Somehow, AT&T was allowed to repurchase SBC, so now it's just AT&T again.
Note I don't actually know that Usain Bolt feels that way, but many top athletes do (especially in "world record" type sports like racing). And of course this is my personal assessment of the situation, not the position of my employer, etc etc.
I'm thinking of companies that are hampered by (e.g.) heavy regulation, internal politics and competition, in mature and/or commodity industries.
Examples?
EDIT: Okay. Wow. Had no idea. Has any municipality tried to create a wireless mesh network that connected through a few high-bandwidth connections?
There are plenty of other cases, but the OP is right. The telco incumbents will use any means necessary - propaganda ("it's anti-capitalist!"), bribes (aka, lobbying) and lawsuits - to keep extracting as much profit as possible from people while delivering the barest minimum service possible.
Monticello, Minnesota (2008): http://www.ilsr.org/monticello-fiber-network-fighting-frivol...
Lafayette, Louisiana (2010): http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2010/05/lousiana-fiber-ne...