Bob Frankston has an essay on how the FCC should change policy to replace 'telecoms' with 'connectivity'

The simplest ideas are often the hardest to explain. How do we explain that an entire industry is no longer necessary? It's as if we tried adapt an industry built around horses to supporting auto-mobiles. Fortunately the horse industry didn't have the regulatory support that keeps the telecommunications industry from evolving into a connectivity industry.

The good news is that connectivity is indeed simple and our task is to remove barriers rather than create a new and ever more complex regulatory system. The key problem is that the first mile of connectivity is an artificial chokepoint created by modeling telecommunications after the railroads and granting privileged rights of way to companies providing a specific service. There is an inherent conflict between this service-based model and connectivity which gives the customer the ability to define the services.

The remedy of structurally separating the companies that provide connectivity from those that provide services and content may seem radical but it is not unprecedented. We've seen movie studios being forced to divest themselves of their theaters and the TV networks, in turn, couldn't own the production companies until a competitive industry developed.
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The biggest surprise was yet to come. As capacity grew it became possible to use the Internet for carrying audio and video streams without any special engineering. The early implementations were tricky because they had to work around the capacity limitations but the Moore's law effect delivered abundant capacity. Capacity involved not only bandwidth but also latency � for interactions with remote services the travel time was critical.

Just like specialized word processors could not match the rapid pace of improvement in general purpose computing, special purpose networks were no match for the general purpose networking that the Internet provided.

Another good exposition of the central point - compare with the ones I collected here.