It's more than just lack of competition. What's happened is all cable television and phone companies have realized they are completely fucked. The Internet is way more disruptive than they originally thought. With VOIP and Netflix/bittorrent nobody needs a phone or television anymore. So there is a conflict of interest growing among the only companies that are providing broadband internet.

These companies don't want to be relegated to simple utilities with low profit margins, and so they are doing everything in their power to keep the cost of data rising even while their cost of the bandwidth drops by half each year. With bandwidth caps and usage-based billing at 5000% profit margin they are simply begging the government to crack down on what ends up being highway robbery.

Competition for the sake of competition doesn't necessarily make things cheaper. If you have to make three copies of the physical infrastructure, that's not cheap.

I've seen business plans for rural wireless internet projects and typically the economics work out if you can sign up all of the customers in an area but if you've got to split them with the phone company and a cable company you can't pay for the tower and charge an affordable rate.

Now, I know a guy who owns the patent for "virtual geosynchronous" satellites that would have about 1/3 the latency of today's satellite internet connections and drastically increase the availability of satellite bandwidth. Despite having a patent portfolio that covers many aspects of the system, he can't get to first base when it comes to finding a few $1B to build the system.

Incumbents in this space, however, are happy to keep selling satellite "fraudband" internet and hundreds of crappy TV channels.