Rob Walker weighs in on the refusal of cable companies to carry advertising for DSL. I’ve also read that phone companies are generally only rolling out DSL to areas where cable companies are offering cable modems, or they face some other form of broadband competition. Cable companies, phone companies, media companies — they all suck. I’m just surprised they haven’t figured out a way to buy legislation that will allow them to merge into one giant quasi-governmental agency. Then we could have the media/communications company (probably named something like (Warner Sprint Bell Worldcom AOL, Inc.), and the software company (Microsoft). Wouldn’t that make things delightfully simple?