The ability to pipe TV over IP is dramatically weakening the natural cable company monopolies. In AT&T phone service territory, as they upgrade their network you can switch to U-Verse for not just internet but also television, with a much improved set-top box experience.

I don't agree with the claim that opening up the ability to lay a cable network to everyone would help things -- heck, look how slow the deployment of U-Verse is taking over AT&T's existing infrastructure... having to do that from scratch, laying a whole new network over the city and in everybody's yards, would be a many times larger endeavor -- but technological changes are already making competition much more possible than before since now both of those entrenched networks can be used for TV.