I partly agree with Mrs. Michele Malkin and partly disagree with her regarding the decision that cable companies do not have to share their infrastructure.[1] I agree with her mostly on the political content and disagree with her mostly on the technical content.
The cable companies have invested significant capital into their networks. They have a right to the profits derived from their use. I do not know to what extent, if any, public land has been used for the network, nor to what extent, if any, tax dollars have subsidized its deployment. To the extent that either is true, conditions for the use could naturally be placed by the granting government. That is, the government could say that you can only use public land to deploy the cable network if and only if you agree to allow competitors use of the network. I think that it is also fairly clear however that a cable company would be reluctant to invest in an area with such a restriction. Overall, while the localized monopolies likely are not ideal, they are also not truly anticompetative, except to the extent where supported by government (IE a government restriction, if any such exist, mandating but one cable company can operate in an area). So overall, I really do not disagree with the decision here.
I do disagree that there are alternatives for cable Internet. In some, mostly fairly urban, areas, one or more forms of DSL may be available. It often is not, and sometimes in surprising places. I can just barely get DSL for example, just outside of Herndon and Reston. DSL, where available, is, however, a viable alternative to cable Internet. Satellite, wireless, and dial-up however are not.
Satellite Internet is subject to the same flaws as satellite television. Unlike television however, satellite Internet is, at least for now, extremely sensitive to weather. Imagine your Internet going out with each snow storm. That is not truly an alternative to always-on service. It is, however, close, and I imagine that with time it will be.
Wireless Internet has significant concerns with security, reliability, and speed. It is typically slower than your cable connection, though perhaps not so noticeably as to bar it as an alternative on these grounds alone. Its security concerns are even greater. The use of a wireless router for a home network nicely summarizes the flaws here. The wireless network is inherently unsecurable, and it is fairly easy to crack into one, and gain illicit access to both the network's outside connection and to the computers connected to that network. Imagine paying for your next door neighbor's Internet use. The same holds true of wide area connections. For this reason, wireless is primarily useful when deployed at a city or store level, because the implication of an untrusted network is, in these scopes, explicit. Further, the free nature of the connection makes the inability to secure access to it irrelevant. Lastly are the reliability concerns. Common housing materials, especially the tin and aluminum used for siding, fireplaces, and, in some houses, even between floors to retard fires, will disrupt and degrade the signal. Electrical interference can as well. For these reasons the home network is not a viable solution for everyone, and for the same reasons the wide area connection will sometimes fail. It should then be fairly clear that it is not in general a viable alternative to an always on, reliable, and relatively secure (single access point) connection that DSL or cable Internet would provide.
Lastly I include dial-up, simply because it is absurd to include it at all. The oldest of the Internet connection technologies, and nearly globally available, it is also the slowest. Its existence is the reason why we differentiate between an "Internet connection" and a "high speed Internet connection." Clearly then, when the market has already seen fit to differentiate this type of service from the DSL and cable Internet services, it is NOT an alternative.
[1] http://michellemalkin.com/archives/002858.htm