Competing on internet access alone
A while ago, I suggested that some state attorney general or state Public Utilities Commission might want to investigate why prices for highspeed internet access (including symmetric access!) aren't going down, and whether the incumbent telephone companies and cable companies are cooperating somehow.
I got a kind email from someone in a state AG's office saying “you know, we're interested in facts, so give us facts.” The message also pointed out that under recent caselaw (the “Twombly/Matsushita” line of cases) mere failure to compete, or tacit collusion, wouldn't necessarily be enough for a prosecution of any kind. Under Twombly, you'd need to show “plausible grounds to infer an agreement,” at the very least.
So there are at least three significant mountains to climb to make out an antitrust case in this context.
The first is that the incumbents don't charge separately (in general) for highspeed internet access. (Doc Searls has a nice post on this today.) It's all packages, with the emphasis on phone and video services. Bruce Kushnick has been trying to document Verizon and AT&T phone bill prices going up, and he's finding that highspeed access is only available with promotional packages. (ISPs are also going out of business, as we know.) This means that making out a case about non-competition in highspeed internet access (by itself) is difficult. As the Dept. of Justice found a quarter of a century ago in trying to figure out what on earth Ma Bell was doing with cross-subsidizing equipment and services, the internal accounting of these players is difficult to parse.
The second is that cable and telephone companies could be equally interested in avoiding disruptive internet-only competition, and doing their best to use their market power to hang onto their packages. Neither side has an incentive to cannabilize itself in favor of commodity internet access. So they may never have actually agreed. They may be just acting in parallel, which is not necessarily illegal.
And the third is that any case about this issue would take years and years of unbelievably painful litigation to prove. Many state PUCs don't really want to take on these actors, and state AGs may feel the same way. You'd need to find an insider to lead you by the hand, and life for that insider might be made very difficult.
But - if there's a state AG out there who thinks there's something to this issue, I'm confident that consumers would be grateful for the attention.