There is a specific problem with last mile services: It costs approximately the same amount to install fiber down every street whether you have 5% of the customers or 95%.

So you have an incumbent with no competitors and therefore no incentive to invest in infrastructure instead of just charging the monopoly price for the existing bad service forever. If no one new enters the market, that never changes.

However, if there is a new entrant that installs fiber, the incumbent has to do the same thing or they're going to lose all their customers. So then they do it.

Recall that it costs the same to do that regardless of what percent of the customers you have, but they currently have 100% of the customers. Now no matter what price you charge, if it's enough to recover your costs then it's enough to recover their costs, so they just match your price. Then you're offering the same service or the same price, so there is no benefit to anyone to switch to your service now that they're offering the same thing, and inertia then allows them to keep the majority of the customers. Which means you're now in a price war where you'll be the one to go out of business first because customers will stay with them by default when you both charge the same price. And since this result is predictable, it's hard to get anyone to invest in a company destined to be bankrupted by the incumbent.

Which means that if the customers want someone to compete with the incumbent, they have to invest in it themselves. At which point going bankrupt by forcing the incumbent to install fiber is actually a decent ROI, because you pay the money and then you get fiber. Furthermore, you can even choose to not go bankrupt, by making the basic fiber service "free" (i.e. paid for through local taxes), which then bankrupts the incumbent and prevents the local residents from having to pay the cost of building two fiber networks instead of just one.

And here in Sweden we have the same for fiber. I don't think it is mandated here, since not every place has multiple options like that, but many do. If you have municipality owned fiber (stadsnät) it always work like that I believe, often you have a choice between 15 or so different ISPs.

if an area has been waiting for… (what would it be now? around 30 years since the internet took off?) so these companies had 3 decades to build out and have refused, if we the tax payers step in and we pay for it, why should we let them in? they have refused to do anything for literal decades… even worse, many of these companies took billions in subsidies and still did nothing. they’ve refused to be good boot strappin capitalists, for decades.

(i want to reiterate what i said above, i believe competition can often work really really well. but if we dont understand by now that it fails sometimes too, we're not seeing clearly.)

think about how long that is, like some people become grandparents at around 35. someone born in the windows 95 days might have a grandkid and the poor sap still wont be able to get fiber. even in tons of urban and suburban areas.

some of these same ceos have gone on about how perfect the marketplace is, how awful taxes are, how magical the marketplace is… decades later if we have to build it, why should they get a piece?

The rest of the service isn't. Transit is a fairly competitive market. You may also have providers willing to use more expensive terminating equipment and then offer higher-than-gigabit speeds on the same piece of fiber. You want the competitive market for every aspect of the system where it can work and to keep the monopoly as narrow as possible.

Notice that the point isn't to let just Comcast use the municipal fiber and then get ~100% of the customers again, it's to let this happen with fiber to the home:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mobile_virtual_network...

Also, wouldn't those subsidies come with a legaly enforceable requirement to actually build out infrastructure? If not, I think that is where you went wrong.

no subsidies. if they cant do it, fine, we'll do it and we'll provide cheaper than they ever would have. and in the case of fiber, we know this is the case. there are plenty of municipally owned fiber areas that are solid and cheap af.

its ok to admit that the market doesnt always work. often, absofuckinlutely. always? not at all.

a lack of subsidies would make it obvious where those failures exist so we can just do it ourselves (the spooky government) for cheaper. tell them "you had your chance" and move on with our day.

Do I recall incumbent providers lobbying to ensure that competition be forbidden, so that they can continue to charge a lot for bad service? I think at least a couple of years ago, 16 US states had banned community internet at the behest of Comcast and chums.

I suppose that municipal broadband being banned at the behest of incumbent monopolies and duopolies isn't quite outright banning competition; just making it a lot harder to do.

Or, more facetiously, I don't need a subsidised fire service because no building I visit is currently on fire.

In my opinion internet access is as fundamental a right now as water access so I think it should be subsidized to a fair degree.

But not for example if it is to supply only a small island of rich people just because they happen to want to live there and force the rest of the state to supply them. There's nuance to these things and we can't just outright subsidized everything and we can't market economy everything either

In that technological era of horses and handwriting, it became the US Postal Service, but I think if it occurred today it would be the US Networking Service.