Ads, investors, and consumers. These people need to pay ever more as the regulation forced upon them by the FCC makes it more and more difficult to run a profitable business.

If they provided a decent service on their own, they wouldn't have the FCC poking their ass whenever they get customer complaints.

Again a flaw of government, not corporations. If governments were immune to corporate influence by deregulating everything, corporations would have no legal power and must survive by providing more to their consumers for less.

Is this a personal anecdote or do you have empirical evidence that proves corporate influence is a non-factor if governments deregulated economies?

I don't know if you've ever stepped outside, but as long as corporations have money and power, and politicians desire money and power, corporations WILL influence government.

What? How does having only one provider make the market more competitive?

Because they are publicly owned. Instead of existing solely to increase value for shareholders, they exist to provide a service for a fair price. It's amazing what can be accomplished when people aren't stuffing their pockets full.

Again, we come back to the part that if corporations weren't so damn greedy, cities wouldn't need to bury their own fiber to get around greedy ISP's that demand top dollar for shit service.

You have to have very low amounts of capital if you didn't have to hire lawyers for $500/hr just to comply with FCC regulations. In fact you could just have one customer that is attracted to you buy your data rates and then two, and three eventually you would have money pouring in and would be able to out compete, by better serving the consumer.

That's just not true, and you know it. Most of the costs associated with starting an ISP is setting up infrastructure.

Also, that's their choice to choose lawyers that won't work for less than $500/hr. The lawyer labor force is oversaturated so you can easily find someone that will work for decent wages.