After a decade, the noisy “net neutrality” debate is reaching a crescendo. President Obama has weighed in against the cable and phone companies. While his own appointee as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, a former cable industry lobbyist, searches for a Solomonic compromise that is sure to usher in another decade of political combat, legal challenges and regulatory gamesmanship.

This is a debate that has come to be dominated by hypocrisy, half-truths and impenetrable complexities.

At one level, net neutrality is a solution to a problem that, for the moment, doesn’t exist. While Americans pay higher rates for slower service than Internet users in other countries, a combination of public opinion, regulatory pressure and antitrust consent decrees has restrained Internet service providers (ISPs) from blocking, prioritizing or otherwise discriminating against other people’s content — the evils net neutrality aims to solve.

Perhaps you’ve seen the video of HBO’s John Oliver ranting about those infamous “tolls” now extracted from Netflix and a handful of other video companies by Comcast, Verizon and AT&T. It turns out that they aren’t very large and they aren’t, as often alleged, for “prioritization” of their content on the capacity-constrained “last mile” of the digital network. They are the kind of charge that network operators have always charged each other when traffic running between any two of them is imbalanced. Moreover, the choke points aren’t on the last mile but at the interchanges between the networks, and alleviating them would be relatively cheap and easy.

At another level, what the net neutrality debate is really about is deciding who will pay the considerable costs of building out the infrastructure to handle all those bandwidth-hogging videos and games that we’ll be downloading from the Internet. The content providers and start-up app creators, naturally, think they shouldn’t have to pay because that would discourage their economy-disrupting innovation. The ISPs, naturally, think they will only have the money and incentive to expand their network if they can levy an extra charge on the Netflixes and the Googles who have sucked most of the value out of the Internet.

But here’s the thing: In a genuinely competitive market, it shouldn’t matter. Whichever side pays will simply pass the cost on to us consumers. This is just a fight between two industries trying to make sure it’s the other which is forced to raise prices.

The real problem, however, is that the market isn’t genuinely competitive, and getting less so. This is more an antitrust problem than it is a telecom problem.

When the last revision to the Telecommunications Act was enacted in 1996, the expectation was that consumers would have at least three companies to choose from for Internet service: the local phone monopoly, the local cable monopoly and one or more wireless or satellite companies.

But as the Internet has evolved, we don’t just use the Internet to send e-mail, buy diapers and concert tickets and download music. Increasingly, we use the Internet for video phone calls, playing online games, exchanging photos and home videos and downloading high-definition movies and TV shows. The phone companies’ copper wires, the cable companies’ coaxial cables and the cellphone operators’ limited radio spectrum will be incapable of carrying that volume of traffic.

Even now, most Americans looking for such service at a reasonable price have one choice, the cable company. Unless major investment is made to run high-capacity fiber-optic cable to most neighborhoods, the existing infrastructure will soon be overwhelmed.

The real challenge here isn’t to figure out the best way to regulate cable and phone companies in an environment of constrained capacity and imperfect competition, which is what net neutrality is meant to do. As we should have learned from years of failure trying to force competition onto local phone and cable monopolies that’s a fool’s errand. The industry’s lawyers, lobbyists and marketers will quickly find ingenious ways to circumvent and undermine any regulation they face. The better solution is to solve the capacity problem.

“We should be asking ourselves how do we create abundance, not how do we manage and allocate scarcity,” says Blair Levin, a former chief of staff at the FCC now at the Brookings Institution.

Several years ago, Verizon set out to do just that, investing $26 billion so far in its Fios service in 20 cities. Only about 40 percent of the houses that Verizon’s fiber cables cover have signed up for the service, which by one analyst’s estimate works out to a capital investment of about $1,350 per customer. Given that drain on its cash, along with the considerable cost of operating the system and acquiring customers, Verizon officials have indicated they are in no rush to expand its Fios service to other communities that are likely to be even less lucrative.

Dave Schaeffer knows a lot about the workings and economics of the Internet. He’s the founder and longtime chief executive of Cogent, the Georgetown-based company that operates an all-fiber network that is part of the Internet “backbone.” Schaeffer says the experience of Verizon and other companies that have tried to bring fiber to the home suggests that relying on the competitive market to deliver ubiquitous high-speed broadband is a pipe dream. The capital costs and risks are so great, he says, that the market is a “natural monopoly” — a market that can most efficiently be served by a single firm. And to prevent that firm from abusing its monopoly, it must be regulated.

By their actions, companies like Verizon and Comcast acknowledge this reality. Verizon has recently focused its investment on its more profitable wireless business, slowly retreating from its dwindling landline business. And Comcast has decided it would rather invest $60 billion buying up content businesses (NBC Universal) and other cable companies (Time Warner Cable) than rushing to bring high-speed fiber to its service areas. These highly profitable companies have little incentive to cannibalize an existing business built on decades-old networks that, for the most part, have been fully depreciated. Even if they were allowed to charge Netflix and Google for “paid prioritization,” there is no reason to believe they would use the proceeds to increase capacity and eliminate the bottleneck that gives them the leverage to extract the toll in the first place.

It was the concept of a natural monopoly in 1913 that led the Justice Department to give AT&T and the Bell companies a virtual phone monopoly. The so-called Kingsbury Commitment led to the creation of the most advanced and most efficient wire-line phone network in the world.

The same model was used to create the cable television industry in the 1960s and 1970s. And it remains the model in the electric business, where distribution of power to households is done by regulated monopolies even after the generation of power to competitive, deregulated markets in the 1990s. While there have been times when regulation has been ham-handed or outlived its usefulness, the argument that regulation is always bad is baloney.

The way it would work for broadband Internet access would be quite simple: Phone and cable companies could compete for local exclusive franchises, with the winner compensating the loser for any stranded (un-depreciated) infrastructure. Regulators would set prices that would guarantee the winners a rate of return sufficient to attract the necessary capital to build out the fiber network. As long as these monopoly ISPs adhered to rules preventing them from discriminating against competitors — yes, net neutrality — they could enhance their profits by offering phone, television, movies, games and other services. Such a system could be built in a decade at a cost of less than $200 billion. Financed at 5 percent interest over 20 years, that works out to $10 per household per month.

Telecommunications is a means, not an end. The aim of telecom policy should not be figuring out regulatory contortions to artificially create a competitive market for Internet access where one does not exist. Rather, it should be to assure everyone cheap and ubiquitous Internet access in order to create a robust and competitive Internet economy.