Here's one of the large problems with regulation of industry - what seems like a good idea now often becomes an arcane piece of incoherent legacy later. If we ever got rid of the regulation, it would be one thing, but - witness the fantasy discussions surrounding long distance phone calls:

The biggest expense of offering local phone service is maintaining the wires to each customer's house (wires which in many cases also carry Internet traffic). In any case, virtually all of the costs of offering phone service are fixed and have nothing to do with how many calls customers make, how long they talk or what distance the calls travel.

You'd never know any of that from looking at the vast apparatus that sets and regulates phone rates. The industry is divided into local phone companies, which are regulated by state utility commissions, and long-distance companies, regulated by the F.C.C. And much of that regulation mandates pricing calls by the minute.

What we have now is useless public regulatory commissions arguing over the minutiae of irrelevant non-facts. So you have phone calls regulated via a hodge podge of antiquated rules, while the data that travels over the same set of wires is under a completely different set of rules. And apparently, none of the people involved are willing to stand up and wonder why the emperor has no clothes...