Because many existing laws & regulations are bought and paid for by big business to preserve their dominant position through the use of legally sponsored anti-competitive tactics. You can't undo the past but you can make new laws & regulations to level the playing field some.
Then you should unwind the existing laws and regulations, not add a new regulation that will inevitably favor narrow interests. And if you cannot role back the existing detrimental regulations, what chance of success do you have making new positive regulation?
In US telecom most of the damage is done already. Taking away the laws, regulations and policies that built government assisted monopolies does not set things right. Many of those regulations are already side stepped and you don't see new wireless, cable or fiber deployments from startup private industry. It's too expensive to compete against an infrastructure that was bought & paid for decades ago. A great example of this is the FCC wireless spectrum auction. Who ended up getting it? All the big established government assisted telecom monopolies of years past for the most part. It was open to anyone yet Verizon & AT&T spent more than $15B to extend their strangle hold. It's nice to have $15B worth of capital you earned from years of plundering anti-competitive markets.
I see your point about the problems of more regulation to solve past regulation and would prefer to see socialized broadband instead. The market is too screwed up for the private telecom sector to ever recovery even with lots of good regulation. Since it's quite expensive to build this type of infrastructure nationwide open/fair access policies are a step in the right direction. It's treating the symptoms, not the disease.
I can pretty much guarantee that eliminating the regulations that led to the current telecommunications oligopoly will not result in Bell competitors sprouting up all over the place. It's a done deal.
Why shouldn't it? Didn't Mint successfully take on Intuit? I don't understand this lack of faith in entrepreneurship in such a place as HN. Not just picking on the parent, but my downmodded question and the general fervor towards legislation such as "net neutrality".
What about after the airlines were deregulated? Didn't we get great prices and service from lots of newcomers? Would you rather we go back to airline regulation?
What about after the electricity market in California was "deregulated" a few years ago? Didn't my employer lose millions of dollars by having to shut down its factories during the ensuing rolling blackouts, which in turn were caused by successful efforts to create artificial scarcity and extort billions of dollars from the public?
But you shouldn't read too much into that example either. The lesson here is that buzzwords aren't always useful for understanding the world. The word deregulation means different things in different situations. Airlines are still a heavily regulated industry: Health and safety regulations, security regulations, labor regulations, international treaties, state and local regulations. (You think you're going to be allowed to launch a jet helicopter from your suburban backyard? Your neighbors think otherwise.) But there was a moment when a few of those regulations were removed or changed in a useful way that permitted the market to work better, and that event was named "airline deregulation".
Which does not imply that every action called "deregulation" is going to be equally successful, or even that such actions are especially similar to each other. The devil is in the details. What matters is what the regulations are, and what the situation is.
The comparison is not apt; you seem to be invoking airlines in the belief that they are a similarly capital-intensive industry. This is not really true. You can start up an airline with a bunch of rented or chartered planes, so you don't have to buy much of anything. (And even if you do want to buy them, investors know that they can be sold later and take that into account when loaning you money.)
You can't really do that if you want to be a modern ISP. (At one point, due to line-sharing rules, you could be a DSL ISP without too much infrastructure investment, but this is no longer true; the rules were gutted a few years back and with them went most of the small mom-and-pop DSL operations.) It's a hell of a lot harder to get investment for a fiber deployment---which won't be worth much of anything if the business folds---than it is to buy an aircraft, which at the end of the day will still be a valuable asset.
The industries in question have very little in common, so it should come as no surprise that strategies to induce competition within them look totally dissimilar as well.
Quite right, big business has successfully lobbied for many unfair advantages. But two wrongs do not make a right. Undo the damage by repealing existing regulation instead of heaping statute upon statute.
"Repealing existing regulations" would not suddenly make the entrenched entities who grew powerful under the protection of those regulations vanish.
Sure, you'd have a level playing field (of sorts), but some of the players would have had years to practice: the result would be anything but a fair fight.
The only way deregulation would work is if it was accompanied by demonopolization. Since that is not politically feasible, it would be a mistake and probably lead to worse outcomes to go ahead with only the deregulatory part.
