Some areas still have both a contract with the local government, and tax breaks and other services provided to them by the local government. This is why the 'open access' arguement is raging fiercly in places like Northern Virginia -- Fox Cable got millions in tax and right of access breaks from the government over the years, but now claims that they own the cable and shouldn't be required to resell access to competitors.
The above is just plain wrong, fact-wise. I live in Northern VA. The cable company you are trying to name is "Cox Cable", I think, though it might be Comcast. They got ZERO in breaks, because they just took over the system from Media General. The system they got from Media General was so run down that Cox is having to re-build the entire system. Ditto for Comcast, which took over the Reston, Prince William County, Arlington, and Alexandria systems, which were also in bad shape (e.g. mostly copper, little if any fibre) prior to Comcast. There might be different places where the CATV firms got a break, but Northern VA was not one of them. Oh, and there is no raging "open access" debate in Northern VA going on. By and large, the folks with Cox/RoadRunner or Comcast@Home are happy with their service. There aren't protests, the newspapers (e.g. The Washington Post) don't have any articles about such a local 'debate', etc. Oh yes, and before you get into ad hominem attacks, I don't own stock in either Cox or Comcast (never have) and don't work for them (never did), so I have no axe to grind in what I say above. There might or might not be merits in forced access to CATV cabling, but inventing fictional accounts of what's happened in Northern VA is not contributing to a discussion of that topic. Ran rja@inet.org