Getting rid of the regulation altogether seems like tossing out the baby with the bathwater. It seems like it would be possible to correct by removing the loophole of routing calls through a rural region that are not terminating at a resident of that actual region. I don't understand telephony enough to know whether that's a simple thing to detect or not, though.
It's not a simple thing to detect. Short of broad-scale wiretapping, if I bridge two calls on my office phone nobody will know except my in-house PBX. The telco sees two simultaneous calls into my PBX, but unless they are actively listening in on both lines, they can only guess whether these two callers are also talking to each other.
