Here is an excellent article on the growing movement in Washington to take another look at the 1996 Telecom Deregulation Act. There is growing agreement that a) the law worked poorly, if at all, and b) it's now beginning to make things much worse.
Unlikely advocates are emerging to support new legislation. The phone companies want to get into the TV business, which was formerly the exclusive playground of the cable companies. The phone companies are going to go straight to Internet TV. They can do this because more people are tossing dial up over the side of the boat every day and signing up for broadband. And the protocols for delivering video have improved immensely over the past several years. Broadband can deliver TV, at least in a limited way, but the phone companies have realized it is their only way out of the mess they are in--free or very low cost phone service via VoIP is killing them.
The cable companies always tend to be a bit behind, which is pretty damning when you think about it. Would you want to claim you are almost as forward thinking as the phone company? The cable companies want to get into the telephony business, and already claim to have millions of customers. This is a bad direction to head because as I just said, the phone business is dead on the vine. The cable companies have decided to pick some very rotten fruit.
The '96 Telecom Act complicates all this tremendously because the government, in '96, treated TV and telephony differently. Today, both those services are just a stream of electrons shooting down the broadband pipe. It's absurd to view telephony as something deserving of special regulation and a pile of really dumb taxes.
Communities lack a strong, clear voice in Washington, although a few legislators realize this is important stuff. The really smart thing to get rid of the FCC entirely, but there are too many sacred cows who depend on complex rules and complicated taxes. It's hard to know what the current administration will do; when free markets and special interest business monopolies collide, the results are not often pretty.
The phone and cable companies are attacking on all fronts. They are pouring millions into state level lobbying efforts to keep communities from controlling their own future. And the Washington monopoly lobbyists are surely working overtime to keep things hideously complicated--that makes it more difficult for small, nimble Knowledge Economy companies to compete with firms that spend hundreds of millions on lawyers.
This is no kerfuffle by any means; this is a major mess that hits every community in America right between the economic development eyeballs.