Coming back around to the last conversation....
The large majority of users do already complain about the speeds at which they can upload photos among other things, the quality has not increased. Cities do not have sufficient control over facilities based internet providers to hope to push for changes. State level regulation may be effective, but unlikely to happen since it would grossly change the environment compared to other states. If a federal 'rule' (ie: nationwide franchise, and its gonna come someday) happened I'd expect it to be awful and run roughshod over consumers.
I think the best tool consumers have right now against bad providers is anti-competitiveness complaints. Find an issue you can *prove* and run with it. Send lots of letters to your franchise authority and FCC. My experience through the franchise authorities is that the complaint gets to the right people locally instead of dealing with corporate brick walls.
On the telco front you can contact the public utilities commission and they might be able to exert some pressure, but they generally do not regulate internet services.
A question to you -- what behavior bothers you the most? Do you wish the connection was symmetric? Is your connection not reliable? Do you worry about semi-deidentified aggregate URL logs being sold to private industry? Do you want to be able to provide services or have global addressability for all your machines at nominal cost? Do you live in an area where your provider has decided to provide minimal (or no) investment? Is p2p, youtube, or vonage throttled a ton?
Can the 'major' problems be fixed with regulation, rules, laws, municipal networks, or working within the existing frameworks? Are there tangible benefits to changing the system that outweigh added cost to the state/city/etc? Can you prove this to non-technical people, like politicians -- they have to feel its worth the investment when compared to whatever the telcos and cable companies bring to the table. You might just end up being 'used' to get a better deal out of the telcos. Is it worth the work to do so or is it better to just work the angle to get the providers closer to the situation we prefer?
If we focus on blue sky proposals and lose, then the cableco/telco situation may not get any better. If we find places where they are anti-competitive, then theres a reasonable stick that many non-technical people understand as a problem.
