Earlier quoted context omitted.
Who needs to own cables? You could rent cable in some areas, rent satallite for others, build short range wireless towers in others, use laser transmission here, build above ground infrastructure there, channel packets through power cables here, and phone lines there, and speed it up with local caching here, here and here. Technology changes, don't expect the ISP killer to look like an ISP. Just as the land-line phon…
Who would you rent them from? In a libertarian world who should have owned the cables for the past 20 years? How would competition happen when the cost of running new cables all around the country is extremely high?
You've correctly pegged me as a Libertarian =), but I don't know who should be the title holders of the existing infrastructure.