Common Cause has a study dated back to 2005 on the results of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 was more media concentration, less diversity and higher prices. It seems that the way it "reduced" barriers to entry allowed for an oligarchy of corporations to dominate the market. In general terms, the way we Libertarians see it, these results either came about from those people who drafted the bill not being able to foresee potential problems like this or these were the intended results, and given that Common Cause seems to believe in that study that citizens were excluded for the meeting that drafted the Act and the political contributions and lobbying effort of these big corporations to elected representatives from both dominating major parties (more to Republicans); well, it's not hard to assume that there might be a connection.

As for your troubles with Comcast, you've stated that there is no legislation at the county or state level supporting Comcast as the sole ISP and that federal laws actively reduce barriers to entry, why not start your own ISP? Especially if Comcast provides a horrible service at a high price?

Here, I've looked up the steps for you. Briefly: 1. Write a business plan. Decide how you want to provide your service, what customers are in your market and how you will reach them. Identify costs and come up with a plan on how you are going to sign up enough subscribers to cover costs. 2. Establish your corporate structure. Once you've figured that out, you'll need to register your business as a company in the town your ISP will be located. 3. Scout for an office location. You'll need the room for your administrative staff, sales and marketing team and customer support department. You're going to have to furnish all the equipment they need to do their jobs. 4. Locate adequate facilities to host the servers that will power your ISP business. Depending where it is, it might cost more money. 5. Get access to the internet backbone. 6. Determine how many T1 lines will need to access your connection to the backbone. 7. Acquire a switch to use with your ISP network. 8. Buy an access server to control your subscribers' login process on your network. 9. Buy the network servers to which your subscribers gain access. 10. Connect all of your devices. 11. Install an ISP management and billing program on the network to manage your subscriber accounts.

Continuing with your questions, given the results of the 1996 Telecom Act, why do you think the Net Neutrality law will prevent Comcast from abusing their monopoly? We don't have a 'free' market to have an ideological need to preserve, so I'm not sure why this argument keeps coming up. We've never had a free market in written history, only ones that have been freer and ones that have not been freer, rather how much government intervention is there in the market at any given time. Here, in this day and age, what we have is more regulation and slightly less regulation that is then defined as deregulation. And that's on new regulations. "Deregulation" of older policies are never fully put forward, so those with money (preexisting companies, Comcast) can more easily purchase the new licenses than even new companies where at best you end up with crappy service. As for a tangible benefit you might get from opposing Net Neutrality as a form of government intervention is perhaps not having the NSA able to gather info on your web searches? Just one.