Not sure why this is being downvoted; it's pretty much the straightforward truth of what happened. The US had Local Loop Unbundling for copper phone circuits from 1996 to 2005. In 2005 under Kevin Martin, who was a political appointee under G.W. Bush and widely understood to be a friend to the ILECs, the FCC stopped defending the policy and basically gutted it through rulemaking. They could have done then what the FCC is doing now, and either threatened or actually moved forward with reclassification, but decided not to for what were pretty clearly political reasons.
These issues are, very obviously, political; anyone claiming otherwise is either being deceitful or deeply in denial.
