Glenn Fleishman has a piece intending to parody attempts by telecommunications interests to outlaw municipal wireless projects by comparing broadband to eletricity.
Sadly, Fleishman's thought experiment is quite close to the historical reality. In the early 20th century, Industry groups did make efforts to bar municipalities and governments from generating electricity and, in some cases muscled their way into markets where public and non-profit utilities already existed. When I read Scott Rosenberg's pointer to the entry, I immediately thought of Patrick McGuire and Mark Granovetter's "Business and Bias in Public Policy Formation: The National Civic Federation and Social Construction of Electric Utility Regulation, 1905-1907." Its not the most quotable piece, but here's a sample.
Despite the academic writing style, I think you'll agree that this is pretty much the scenario Fleishman imagines. One of the reasons I'm motivated to pursuse the history of technology as a scholar is the frustration I often feel when technologists and reporters treat a technology as completely new or "apart from history," but as this case shows, this situation has occurred before.
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