First of all it is important to analyse the reasons behind this hostility between the two parties.
The telecoms infrastructure is still largely dominated by national telecom operators who have for too long been able to extract exorbitantly high charges for the use of their network. Wherever possible corporates, ISPs, ICT providers and others have invested substantially in bypassing those networks. Even today many of these incumbent players do not offer proper wholesale services to other parties in the market; they maintain their preferred ‘retail minus’ rather than the ‘cost plus’ option. Several of these OTT providers have since built their own infrastructure, especially in areas where the telcos failed to move in early (server farms, cloud computing, data centres). At the same time telcos have moved more into data services – some more successful than others – and both groups are now at each throat in their competition battles.
In many countries over the last decade regulators have forced the operators to open up their networks, mainly through bitstream services (ISPs renting DSLAM ports from the operators) and local loop unbundling (ISPS putting their own DSLAMs often with their own backhaul), but there still remain significant legacy problems with the old approach – and in the USA, for example, wholesale access simply never happened. Instead, since the regulatory changes in America in 1996 the internet, and access to it, are now intertwined by default. The FCC completely abandoned the theory that there is a layered infrastructure implementation and treated the internet as a uniform, vertical information service that is unregulated.