Cable providers and Wall Street continue to believe that the best response to cord cutting isn't offering cheaper, better television bundles -- but raising already expensive broadband prices even further. Wall Street has been pressuring cable operators for months to raise broadband rates, insisting that standalone broadband prices specifically should be nudged closer to $90 per month. Combined with usage caps and overage fees, cable providers hope these price hikes help counter the losses they're expecting as competition in the streaming video market heats up.

A research note from Morgan Stanley this week indicated that those price hikes are already well underway. The firm's data indicates that cable TV companies hiked broadband prices by 12% to $66 monthly year over year customers that buy only high-speed internet and not a TV package.

"As video revenue growth is increasingly pressured, leaning on data pricing is tempting to sustain earnings," noted the firm in a report.

None of this is particularly surprising. A lack of competition in the broadband space means few if any repercussions for imposing new hikes on broadband. And cable providers have spent years trying to convince customers that usage caps and overage fees are technical necessities, despite being little more than glorified rate hikes designed to both thwart -- and profit from -- the rise of cord cutting.

And with many telcos giving up on residential broadband and refusing to upgrade their networks, cable's enjoying a growing monopoly in many broadband markets -- making these price hikes easier than ever. As an added bonus, the current FCC is run by former Verizon lawyer Ajit Pai, who has made it abundantly clear that standing up for consumers simply isn't part of his over-arching plan.

In a competitive broadband market, cable operators would be forced to acknowledge that the only way to compete with the rise of streaming operators is to offer better, cheaper TV services and better customer service. But the broken broadband market and the lack of competition in that space allows them to simply seek their pound of flesh in other, more creative ways -- without seriously addressing why so many users are hanging up on traditional cable in the first place.