The Internet railroad magnates.

• Author: Saldana, Dave
• Position: Monopolies control broadband and cable television

Josh Levy wanted to cut the cord. Tired of paying big money to the cable company every month, he bought a Roku Internet-streaming device and got subscriptions to content-streaming services Hulu, Netflix, and HBO-Go. With all of the television programs he wanted to see now available via Internet, he could tell the cable company to get lost.

Except, he couldn't.

"I pay for the basic cable package in order to get the Internet," he explains. "I'm paying Comcast something like $60 a month because I'm only paying for broadband and basic cable, which I'm forced to pay for--I can't just buy broadband."

If anyone could find a way to break free from Big Telecom, it should be Levy. He is Internet campaign director for Free Press, an advocacy group for consumer rights and public interest in the Information Age. (Disclosure: I served as Free Press's communications director in 2011.)

As a Comcast customer, Levy still has to pay a cable company he doesn't like for service he doesn't want. Try as he might, he just can't cut the cord.

"The people who can do it are few and far between," Levy says. "They either live in a community where there's municipal broadband, which most do not have; they live in a city where Comcast, Time Warner, and the other major cable companies don't operate; or they live somewhere with Google fiber, which is three cities. For something like 80 percent of us, we're stuck with one cable provider, usually one of the dominant cable companies in the country. There's no way around it."

The market power of the cable/broadband companies harks back to another time in American history: a time of robber barons and industrial monopolies known as the Gilded Age.

Gilded Age monopolies were generally of two sorts: vertical and horizontal. A vertical trust owned or controlled a resource throughout its economic life, from raw material through processing and manufacture to consumer good, creating an unfair advantage over competitors who had to deal with middlemen. The horizontal trust controlled an entire level of the economic chain, such as transportation. To move their products, for instance, businesses had to deal with railroad companies that could manipulate rates with impunity.

By controlling Internet access, often with no meaningful competition, telecom corporations wield power similar to that of railroads in the nineteenth century, says Tom Mertes, a visiting history professor at Linfield College.

"To stifle competition, the railroads gave preferential rates to larger companies, especially big coal companies with long hauls," explains Mertes. "Farmers and smaller businesses couldn't compete because they were forced to pay much higher rates."

There was no law to protect the public because the...