Illustration by Golden Cosmos

Last spring, a resident of Lexington, Kentucky, named Jessica Abney logged on to her computer and noticed something odd: her monthly cable bill, which had for years been around ninety dollars, had suddenly risen to a hundred and thirty-one dollars. Abney, who is seventy-three, is retired and living alone on disability; she was treated for colon cancer last fall and has regular blood infusions to address two autoimmune diseases. Even a small rise in expenses creates stress on her budget. Abney said that, when she called her cable company, Spectrum, to complain, a customer-service representative told her the bill would go up again soon, by another fifty dollars. “I thought I was going to have a heart attack right there, and I’ve had five heart surgeries,” Abney told me. “I said, ‘This is just not going to stop here. I’m a survivor, and I will do whatever I have to do to get answers.’ ”

Cable providers are among the most despised businesses in the country, regularly coming in below airlines, banks, and drug companies in public-opinion polls. A mini industry of intermediaries has sprung up to help consumers deal with the providers’ notoriously terrible customer service, offering to negotiate bills and publishing online scripts for getting rates cut (“The fleecing of the U.S. continues!” a representative comment reads).

Companies that attract such fervent consumer ire are often the product of extensive market consolidation. Abney’s local cable provider, Time Warner, had recently merged with Charter Communications, and the new entity was named Spectrum. (Charter also acquired Bright House Networks, a cable company formerly owned by Advance/Newhouse, the owner of this magazine.) Telecommunications service in the U.S. is now dominated by five companies: Spectrum and Comcast; the telephone-service providers Verizon and A.T. & T.; and CenturyLink, which has a strong presence out West. These companies have effectively carved up the country, so that in many places there is only one way to reliably stream Netflix, send e-mail, or read the news. “Cable is essentially a monopoly now in urban areas,” Susan Crawford, a professor at Harvard Law School and a former policy adviser to President Obama on science, technology, and innovation, told me. In other words, Crawford said, when it comes to the Internet, a service that is essential for almost every aspect of modern life, “we’re privileging the interests of a couple of companies over three hundred million Americans.” Nowhere are the drawbacks of such an uncompetitive market more evident than in Lexington, which has become an active center of resistance.

Internet service was deregulated during the George W. Bush Administration, with the theory that fewer rules would foster greater competition. For a time, as A.T. & T. and Verizon started building fibre-optic networks to compete with cable Internet, there seemed to be truth to the idea. Over the past few years, however, the companies have largely abandoned those projects; according to Crawford, the capital investments required were too high. President Trump’s newly appointed F.C.C. chairman, a former Verizon lawyer named Ajit Pai, has done little to suggest that the agency will improve the situation—in fact, he has introduced a plan allowing companies to raise rates even further, and abandoned a program that would bring competition into the market for cable set-top boxes.

Rather than fuel vigorous competition and lower prices, the rise of these giant companies has meant that Americans are paying inflated costs for poor service. In Lexington, a university city with a burgeoning technology industry, the mayor’s office started getting calls from constituents shocked by their bills almost as soon as the Charter-Time Warner merger was complete; one city employee now devotes much of his time to fielding the complaints, which are entered in a huge spreadsheet. (“Man with a severe mental disability was sold a Spectrum package,” one reads. “His sister wants to know how he was signed up for service since he doesn’t know his Social Security number or birth date.”) Spectrum said that the price changes simply reflect the fact that Time Warner’s promotional deals have expired.

Last week, Democratic leaders issued a new agenda that singled out the cable industry as an example of bad antitrust law. “We are going to fight to allow regulators to break up big companies if they’re hurting consumers,” Chuck Schumer, the Senate Minority Leader, promised. Such pledges won’t do much to help Lexington. The city scheduled a town-hall meeting later this month to air grievances against Spectrum, and eight hundred people are expected to attend (along with at least one brave representative from the company), but there’s little the town can do. As a letter from Lexington’s chief administrative officer to the cable companies last month read, “The city is left wondering what abuse will be heaped upon it next.”

Abney eventually reached a temporary agreement with Spectrum for a more modest increase in her bill, to a hundred and sixteen dollars a month, which allows her to get her favorite channels—Fox News, Fox Business, the Christian network TBN—and the local news. Still, she blames the government for the problems she’s having and told me that competition needs to be restored somehow. “I’ve never gone through anything like this,” she said. “People are furious. If you go anywhere in this town and mention Spectrum, they go ballistic.” ♦