A metaphor isn't useful if it's comparing dissimilar things. How many contracts have you signed to eat exclusively at McDonalds or pay a fee?
The metaphor showed that businesses will in fact help their competitors if they can make money doing it. That's all I set out to show with it.
You're missing the part where the new guys can't compete on price because they are paying all the same expenses the monopoly is paying to maintain a network PLUS the additional fee to interconnect.
You've failed to show that they can't compete on price. I believe it is quite possible for them to do so, for example by having a better or more streamlined process for client maintenance, giving them a lower cost in that area of their business model than their larger competitor. So I have good reason to believe that they can compete on price while you've offered no reason to believe they can't.
It is proof that non-regulator barriers to entry exist, which was my original point
Us telecoms are not proof that non-regulatory barriers to entry exist, since their dominance comes from already existing non-regulatory barriers to entry. You're not going to get any disagreements from me that non-regulatory barriers to entry exist (the most basic non-regulatory barrier to entry is, for example, human laziness, which exists outside of government restrictions or enforcement), but US telecoms are not a good example of this.
That was never my position!
Then maybe I'm misunderstanding your previous comment: "Between the effect of economies of scale and the massive barriers to entry related to installing entirely new networks it would seem nigh impossible for a small start-up to go up against something like Comcast or TWC"
The most plain-English version is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austrian_School#Methodology Follow the link in that section to 'Praxeology'. It's pretty clear and is summarizing parts of Mises's Human Action which you are free to read if you don't value your time. It's a foundational text for the Austrian school.
Nowhere in there is there any indication that praxeology claims that the free market is perfect. Are you actively trying to troll me with these bullshit ideas?