I know this is borderline socialism, but I wish the federal government would mandate that wireless spectrum holders could no longer sell DIRECTLY to consumers, in the same way that car manufacturers can no longer sell cars directly to the public (and have to go through dealerships).<p>Imagine, for a second, if AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile had to split their companies into the arm that maintains the towers/infrastructure/etc and the arm that resells to consumers. These two companies would have no formal relationship, and would have to form new contracts which put a dollar price on spectrum access, which the retail arm then resells to consumers with bundled phones/support/value-adds/etc.<p>Now smaller companies can fairly compete and even larger companies like AT&T's retail arm could utilise multiple pieces of infrastrastructure to improve their service area and signal. Essentially you're unbundling the retail business from the core infrastructure society now relies upon, but you aren't nationalising them, they're still privately owned, and the shareholders would just get shares in each of the split companies.<p>There are multiple examples of this already: roads, railways, airports, electricity/gas/water, and so on. But this time you're accomplishing the same thing without the need for nationalisation.<p>Right now having the retail and infrastructure parts of the business together in single companies is actually hurting the US's competitive landscape, since the retail part will only expand the infrastructure just as much as they NEED to and barely more. However, if the infrastructure part made all of their money from just infrastructure, they'd have more motivation to keep pushing that forward, rather than looking at retail changes to accomplish the same thing. Giving the infrastructure part singular focus/mission/task.