I don't think we're disagreeing much, but I am going to point out that even in a very practical sense, bandwidth costs money. You focused upon the physical fiber infrastructure, whereas I focused on the concept.
In a practical sense it costs money to get the hardware to support that connection to the home. It costs money to modulate it on a cable to the end user. It costs money to trunk and coordinate the flow so that we do not need to overbuild infrastructure. The Terrabit link you cited may be very low in power, but the gear to process that link at each end is not.
After all, you don't have a pair of wires that go all the way back to the generation plant. You have wires that go to a pole transformer that goes to a substation on a transmission ring through very large transformers, breakers, relays, and so forth. THEN you get to one of several generation plants.
Data networks are no different.
Do we need to regulate these monopolies? Of course! Do we need to set minimum performance standards? Of course! Do we need to set privacy laws? Yes, of course!
This all costs money. My question to you: The infrastructure is expensive. Who pays for it?
I work for a large industrial user of electricity. We have medium voltage substations and we buy our electricity by bidding for blocks of energy in advance and by buying it off of the spot market from the PJM grid. We do get good prices. Why? because we own some of the infrastructure and we attach at the inner tiers of the grid. If you could afford to put a large substation in your back-yard and to run feeders to the transmission grid at a million dollars per mile, you too could get these rates.
Likewise, if you build a data center in your basement, and you manage your bandwidth, you will be paying a lower rate than someone with a home firewall/switch who just wants an ISP to handle his e-mail, DNS, and web site for him.
But you will still be paying for the bandwidth. Someone needs to make the connection in to the rest of the Internet. Someone eventually has to attach to the inner Tiers of Internet routing. That infrastructure isn't free either. The hardware and the trunks and the energy that hardware uses isn't free.
So there will be graduated pricing and volume pricing for how you use bandwidth. Eventually, I predict time-of-day pricing for bandwidth use.
It's not that outrageous. Look at bandwidth use on the Internet. It is not constant. It has a rhythm and flow just like most energy firms have diurnal curves of consumption.
What the FCC seeks to do is to set up a framework that acknowledges this reality. I don't like it, but I also realize that it is very necessary.