Whenever you hear "deregulation", think "choosing winners".
The form of "deregulation" we get from Ajit Pai's FCC selectively advantages the incumbent oligopoly of telcos, leaving in place the most grotesque market-distorting regulations and removing controls on vertical integration which allow for the expansion of telco power into other industries.
Market failure can take myriad forms. The ISP situation in the US is a particularly maddening variant.
The "deregulation" of 1996 had many examples of this. ILECs were allowed into long-distance phone service, which they used their monopoly LEC rents to dominate. UNE-P tricked CLEC/ISP investors into thinking they'd be allowed to compete, but since none of the requirements it imposed on ILECs were enforced, those investors ended up selling their equipment and customer bases to ATT/VZN for pennies on the dollar. The Daughters Bell were allowed to reconsolidate from only the most profitable territories, while money-losers like Hawaii and rural New England (e.g. Fairpoint) were unloaded to fools who weren't capable of serving them well. In every case, the monopolist won.
The form of "deregulation" we get from Ajit Pai's FCC selectively advantages the incumbent oligopoly of telcos, leaving in place the most grotesque market-distorting regulations and removing controls on vertical integration which allow for the expansion of telco power into other industries.
Market failure can take myriad forms. The ISP situation in the US is a particularly maddening variant.