To answer a few of the points of both you and dan0 at once:

Yeah, there has been substantial investment at the core in the last decade. But it is true that drastic over-investment running up to the dot-com bust and 2002 left lots of “dark fiber” in the ground. So in the decade since then, the increase of Internet use has been able to leverage that sunk cost investment.

But lots more fiber is being laid, undersea cables laid, middle mile trenches for Fiber to the Curb, satellite redundancy, metro ethernet. On top of the physical media being buried, technology improvements are being implemented to get more out of the cables. Coarse Wave Division Multiplexing, faster termination equipment, CDNs, caches, transcoders. All of these upgrades are being rolled out by telecom providers. Some will argue it’s not enough, and they may be right. But those that argue that there is NO investment lose all credibility with me. You have to be blind and have no knowledge of telecom to think that.

OTOH, telecom was pretty damned stagnant before 1996.

“It sure felt at the time like a monopolistic rent that manifested itself as differential pricing.”

You are right. Although I would say oligopolistic. There is not enough competition in last mile broadband in the US, but I think there is enough at the core. However, my definition of “enough” falls short of a perfectly competitive industry.

Why would I accept a non-competitive industry? Because I don’t make the laws of economics, I just live with them. Many segments (core, last mile) of a telecom network are what is know as a “natural monopoly”. That is, in a free market, it will tend on its own towards vendors with price power and market control, who are able to extract some rents above Marginal Costs.

The first paragraph in this entry give a good brief on what Natural Monopolies are:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly

Telecom is characterized by huge capital requirements. Especially in an era with rapidly evolving technology. The massively difficult act of having to bury or string cables over thousands of miles means the barrier to entry is huge. Such a market does not exhibit the MC=P characteristics of perfect competition. In most nations, a regulator steps in to “oversee” that the economic rents being charged are not egregious. For more, read the wikipedia entry above. The buried cables around the nation ARE scarce, and it is that scarcity that is driving the prices, NOT the bits which are almost free to send about.

DanO’s point is correct. It’s not “capitalism” (although I think you mean a free market). It’s a natural monopoly. Before it was a heavily regulated natural monopoly. Now it’s a lightly-regulated oligopoly. Yes, way back these companies got favored treatment, free rights-of-way, land access, franchise (exclusivity) rights for towns, and all kinds of other advantages. The compact with the people was, supposedly, that this would give the telco an incentive to serve the town with universal communication access. It may be hard to conceive, but this was not assured back in the day. Telcos would have happily skipped entire small or remote towns that were unprofitable to connect. Just consider the towns that don’t have DSL right now.

Now, after all that preferential treatment, the telcos do not appear to have much gratitude. But this is a grey area, too. Do they owe us much? They were forced to offer universal service to unprofitable regions in exchange for privileged access. Is that deal complete and history, or do they still owe us? I don’t think the answer is clear. But like you, Dan0, I don’t think they should get preferential treatment anymore.

Sorry people. When we dig down into telecom policy this deep, the answers are not obvious. Lobby groups or not, even the truth is murky and unclear. Making good policy is complicated enough. So we absolutely don’t need paid shillheads like Ford and Sununu deliberately lying to get their payoff.