The premise of deregulation was that it would lead to increased infrastructure spending. And it has: the late 1990's and the 2000's saw massive investment into cable and wireless. People assumed at the time the money would go into fiber, but demand exploded in wireless so investment went there instead.The RBOCs promised they would roll out fiber, FCC and PUCs promised they would enforce that, and we assumed any of them had any integrity. Whoops! Then, with the 1996 act, RBOCs traded lots of competitive requirements for the right to reconsolidate into Ma Bell (which at this time they have mostly completed, only now with substantial monopoly of the wireless market in addition to that of the wired one). Again we assumed integrity on the part of any of them. More importantly, lots of wealthy investors assumed that. The two decades since then have been a clinic on how a monopolist who owns the regulators can steal billions from the rest of us. "Too bad about all that money you spent setting up that CLEC... You can forget about us obeying (or the regulators enforcing) any of those leasing or interconnection rules... We'll give you ten cents on the dollar for your now-worthless network and customer base."
Is it any wonder that ATT, SBC, VZN monopolized the wireless market? At the very moment that the market was expanding and big infrastructure investments needed to be made, we had just given them hundreds of billions of dollars! Their abuse of the landline market financed their capture of the wireless market. How could anyone else compete with that? More to the point, who would be stupid enough to try, after getting their asses kicked on the wired side, in direct violation of the 1996 Act? The problem with treating changed circumstances as some sort of extenuation for all the broken promises and unenforced laws, is that the changed circumstances were intentionally engineered by Ma Bell, regardless of the lies they told.
Fool us a dozen times, shame on us.