cer- tainty is clearly an obstacle to the ILECs' decisions to upgrade their net- works both to extend broadband services to more customers and to provide new services. 24 The FCC and the states also require that the prices ILECs charge their end-user customers and ISPs be "just and reasonable," while other providers are free to set prices as market conditions permit or dictate. 25 Moreover, the ILECs must offer any services that they sell directly to end- users to their competitors at prescribed resale discounts. Given their role as regulated retailers and wholesalers of broadband services, the ILECs are also vulnerable to allegations of price squeezes or of unjust or unreasonable prices for the wholesale services that they offer to their competitors. 26 Cable Companies The 1996 act by and large deregulated cable television service prices and imposed no direct new requirements on cable providers that offer The Broadband Revolution Internet services, including cable modem services. As cable companies began to develop their cable modem broadband services, they designed these services to be funneled through their own proprietary ISPs, princi- pally @Home and Roadrunner. As a result, independent ISPs began to petition municipal franchising authorities and regulators to require "open access" for all ISPs. However, there has been no regulatory attempt to require the cable companies to share their infrastructure with competitive broadband service providers. After a series of court challenges, the issue of open access for cable sys- items was referred to the FCC because cable modem service is arguably a "telecommunications" service, not a cable television service. The FCC has yet to complete its rules on this question because its first ruling on the cat- egorization of cable modem services as "information" services was over- turned by the federal courts. 27 Therefore, cable modem service remains essentially unregulated, in contrast to the regulation still facing ILECs for their DSL services. This situation is generally r