You ignore the public utility regulatory agencies of the 43 states that have them. This entire morass came after the TCA of 1998 and subsequent revisions of the FCC rules and regs brought on in the post Judge Greene rulings that initially broke up the Bell System.
Public utilities had to deal with all of these regulatory authorities, and then calculatedly lobbied to create US Federal control so that they'd only have to bribe-- I mean lobby and render campaign contributions-- to one target instead of so many. In-state vs Intrastate vs Interstate issues helped hold them to the floor.
NYC is not a regulatory authority. NY State is, as is the FCC, and to a smaller extent, the NTIA.
Decentralization was good for several reasons: rights of way and easements are local, even personal issues. These are last-mile issues. State issues concern everything from keeping infrastructure support fair and even (including low-profit/sparsely populated areas) to zoning policy, and so forth.
The FCC has evolved what was once called "data communications" as a separate classification, away from telephony. Now these things are the same, but the public's needs have evolved. Decentralization isn't so much meaningless as it's the ability to tailor historical infrastructure to locally evolving needs, and is better democracy.
It's time to conflate consumer communications into a single mandate, IMHO. It has to service we consumers, whether in urban, suburban, or rural areas. Whether it's a text, phone call via wire or cell, or a browser session, it ought to have to meet a set of basic standards, where consumers have well-known and flexible rights.