Haha, I guess I can see why you'd think that's "my premise". Actually I feel we'd be better off if the FCC and all its regulations were eliminated tomorrow. (We'd learn the real meaning of "wireless innovation", at least.) A regulated provider that gets the chance to rewrite all its regulations "mid-stream" benefits from an enormous windfall, and the public is not well-served when its representatives give away such a windfall for free. (Well of course there was expensive lobbying and other corruption, but the public didn't benefit much from that either.) This unearned windfall is the "ripoff" that we're complaining about.

The point is not that every home in the nation should be connected by fiber: that would be unnecessary if the FCC ever got off its ass on unlicensed wireless but more to the point was never feasible even while the RBOC lobbyists were promising it. Promising what they could not deliver is really not different than failing to deliver what they promised.

It's funny, but a fiber in the ground is actually an example of a network component that wouldn't require much effort from a regulated provider to remain useful. If a regulator prevented vertical integration, other operators could compete to "light" the fiber, and that would be enough to accommodate innovation. In fact that's what happens in other nations.

There are two actually-independent wireless network operators in the USA. Sprint and T-Mobile both have to rely too much on the big two for backhaul to really threaten them commercially. While it is true that much spending is in response to demand, that demand would be quite different in a market where the FCC allowed actually-innovative services. Also the RBOCs and their two mutant descendants don't get to complain about the regulations they themselves wrote.