How about: If there is a need, somebody will provide at a suitable price? If no body steps up, we don't need it.
There seems to be ample evidence, in many arenas, that naked capitalism can have disastrous results.
And there are lot of examples and ample evidence in history, in many areas, that complete regulation, complete socialism can have disastrous results as well. If you want to have a good idea on how the internet will look like in the US after regulation, simply look at Australia. The government imposed regulation early on in internet infrastructure market caused nothing but raising the entry barrier for small ISPs, only creating government-approved monopoly for major telcos/carriers. Only such regulation creates a situation where it is cheaper and affordable for a smaller ISP to route traffic from .AU to .US, then back to .AU than interconnect directly with incumbent carrier in their own country. So yes, more regulations definitely help the internet indeed (by adding extra 300ms into the process). Instead of calling for socialist/communist policies to regulate the transit industry, the single-homed networks can simply multihome. Because of Cogent, the cost of transit has come down to single-digit per megabit that even after adding transport costs, it's now affordable to add a 2nd internet connection for practically most organizations out there, especially in the continental US (the same capitalism that you call 'disatrous results' is the same capitalism that brought cheap dollars/meg pricing, allowing smaller companies to multihome now when they couldn't afford to do so in the past). As much as we blame Cogent and Sprint for breaking the internet, I also have no sympathy for individual single-homed downstream customers on either networks. If you are complaining about Sprint<->Cogent depeering and have customers demanding for your mission-critical services, then you are just as negligent to not have multihomed before all of this happened. If you need that 100% uptime guarantee, you shouldn't rely on single carrier, nor should you rely on government for more regulation. No one can help you but yourself in ensuring your uptime-- so perhaps look at your own setup and decide that you need that 2nd connection to back you up when first one fails. This is a simple business logic. James