Airlines are very different from carriers. The market for air travel is dominated by frequent one-off transactions (with consumers often using multiple airlines for a single trip), and boasts several good ways to compare availability and cost. A new entrant can start off with a few routes, build a good reputation, and grow out from there.

New entrants in the telecom market are considerably disadvantaged by comparison. Consumers in this market make long-term purchasing decisions, often driven by contract pricing,and there remain no good, well known ways of comparing providers. The situation is even worse if you're a new wireless carrier, since coverage is crucial and the market is pointlessly segmented by phone tech.

I'm not saying we couldn't benefit from deregulation in some aspects of this market, but the devil is very much in the details, and simply pointing out that "deregulation" helped improve a market with high capital requirements for entry isn't saying much.

So you are saying LESS regulation is the change in regulation you would like to see?

So what regulations would you remove?

I'm saying that despite the fact that airlines are a textbook example of an industry with high capital requirements for entry, deregulation did not hand the industry over to a cartel of incumbents. In fact, air carriage is regularly shaken up by new entrants and new market forces.

Deregulation is such a blanket term encompassing so many things (especially the things regulated right now) that it by itself can't be judged a cure-all. Imagine deregulating the food industry by disbanding the FDA.

Loss of net neutrality will hurt small players in the web space(imagine a startup competitor to Netflix which can't afford deals with so many ISPs).

I'm not in favor of blanket deregulation. Quite the contrary: I'm a Democrat! Message boards tend to take everyone to extremes. I simply want to make the point that deregulation in and of itself doesn't inevitably lead to megacorporate cartels.

Where is the startup competitor to Netflix that will be hurt? Can you send me a link or something?

Franchise agreements and rights of way prevent new ISPs from entering the market. If you want to deregulate, you could start there. I don't think it would help due to the incumbents' economy of scale, though.

Cable franchises and rights of way are scarce goods that were quickly priced according to the markets. Regulations are, in part, an attempt to limit the value of those goods and reprice those goods. This doesn't sound like a good plan to me; the government is good at a good many things, but price discovery is not one of them.

The next wave of connectivity providers hopefully will not depend on rights of way. If you want to talk about things the government should do to balance out Internet access, let's reevaluate how we're handling the RF spectrum.

Yes! And believe it or not, Southwest is now the largest carrier in the US! What a success story.