I must say when I came across the Wall Street Journal's article my first reaction was, well yes we do get a good offer for Internet access over here in France. When my sister went to England recently I was looking at the prices for her and I was pretty astonished. I mean there were a few cheap offers but they were often accompanied with small print that indicated that you had a 5 Gig bandwidth limit for example and/or a 128K connection and that was it. No Wifi included and I can remember one offer saying and if you want to share the line it will cost you more.
Here in France I have a 7-8 Mbps connection, free national and European land line calls and also free calls to North American land lines, a box that I can add a PCMCIA Wifi card to if I want and as the article says you can also get TV channels (which I don't subsribe to). However I use Neuf Telecom and not Free.
It's surprising that France should have been successful here whereas the pro-deregulation countries like the US and the UK have created a system where sole the owners of the telecom companies are getting the best out of the situation rather and consumers are just there to fill their pockets without being a innovation motivator...