Two very American stories about high-speed internet access are colliding right now, and the dissonance is striking. One is like a five-minute Shakespearean tragedy, neatly telling the story of what a high-priced local cable monopoly does (and doesn’t do). The other is a hopeful narrative of intelligent, effective government intervention.

Susan Crawford is a columnist for Backchannel and a professor at Harvard Law School. She is also the author of The Responsive City and Captive Audience. Sign up to get Backchannel's weekly newsletter, and follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

For the brief but evocative tragedy, you probably can guess who the high-priced local cable monopoly is: Comcast. In Vermont, this litigation-happy monolith is suing the state Public Utility Commission, claiming, among many other things, that its First Amendment rights have been violated (because the company is unhappy about the terms under which it is obliged to provide service there).

Comcast took in more than $200 million in Vermont last year. According to the state commission, it has “overall scale and ubiquitous presence” throughout Vermont. No other cable operator in the state reported more than $18 million in revenue in 2016, and only one reported making more than $8 million. That’s a nice summary of the situation in many places in the country: There’s usually just one very large cable operator.

We got into this mess of local cable monopolies throughout the country because Comcast and Time Warner Cable, the two giants, have grown by acquiring companies and swapping systems between themselves to ensure that they avoid competition in particular regions. And because they’re so big, they can spread their costs across zillions of customers, making it difficult for any new provider of service to do it more cheaply than they can.

Comcast’s history in Vermont is a case in point. In 2005 the company bought the now-defunct Adelphia Cable’s Vermont business. That was quite a deal—the Green Mountain State systems were a tiny part of a mega-arrangement that had Comcast and Time Warner Cable both buying up parts of Adelphia and trading millions of subscribers between themselves.

Take a deep breath before you decode this next sentence. Time Warner Cable got Adelphia’s systems in the Carolinas, and swapped its systems in Minneapolis, Memphis, and Jackson for Comcast’s holdings in Dallas, Los Angeles, and Cleveland. Time Warner became the largest cable provider in Los Angeles and New York City. Comcast got new customers in Washington, D.C. and Boston.

In the decade since the Adelphia deal and the swaps, both companies have gone from strength to strength: Comcast is the biggest ISP and pay-TV company in the country, as well as one of the handful of major US media content companies. Time Warner Cable, now branding itself as Spectrum after its acquisition by Charter, is similarly enormous.

Along the way, Comcast has continued to operate in the leafy, hilly, thinly populated, freezing cold state of Vermont. Adelphia hadn’t done a great job, and so as a condition of allowing Comcast to buy Adelphia’s systems, the state regulator required Comcast to fulfill Adelphia’s preexisting obligation to extend its lines to unserved areas of the state.

Now Comcast’s franchise in Vermont is up for renewal, and the state wants that line extension work—an obligation to which Comcast agreed when it bought Adelphia—to continue, with Comcast duty-bound to build out 550 additional miles of cable over the next 11 years. Comcast can choose where to do the work so that it’s most cost-effective for the company, but it has to keep that work going, bringing lines carrying high-speed internet access (as well as, if desired, pay TV) to people who don’t currently have it.

Comcast is spitting mad. It says what the regulator is doing is “arbitrary, unprecedented, and will ultimately harm local cable subscribers by resulting in millions of dollars in increased cable costs.” That’s perplexing to the utilities commission: All that’s going on is that obligations based on the Adelphia conditions, to which Comcast agreed in order to consummate that mega-deal a decade ago, are continuing in the franchise renewal. And Comcast’s costs and margins are within its control; whether or not it chooses to pass along higher costs to consumers in Vermont (where the public already sees Comcast prices as high and rising) is up to Comcast. (Which, by the way, is valued at more than $180 billion.)

Comcast says it’s a “recognized provider of protected speech under the First Amendment and, as such, may not be singled out for undue burdens that infringe on such rights.” What’s the singling out here? Well, the regulator is saying that Comcast is the biggest operator in the state and can afford to extend its lines, in areas the company chooses, over the next 11 years. There’s a “large number of currently unserved communities in Comcast’s service area,” the regulator says. Comcast’s response? It says, essentially, that being called “biggest” amounts to “singling out”—choosing a particular speaker whose speech the state wants to constrain. Wow.