Waht the government needs to do (but never will) is make the last mile a municipal utility such as in Chattanooga [1].
Instead we have monopolies that do what all monopolies do in a capitalist organization of the economy: they rent-seek, spend their time and money on lobbying to legislatively exclude competition (eg [2]), do the bare minimum and take public money to roll out broadband but then just not do it (eg [3].
The Internet is the US is objectively awful for most people by the standard of other developed economies [4].
It's ridiculous that people still defend this system.
Municipal ISPs are a good start, and they illustrate how much of your ISP bill goes to debt service from when the commercial ISP bought out competitors.
But you don't have to run a municipal ISP like a commercial ISP. If pricing goes low enough, just make it an amenity, like parks and sidewalks, and fund it that way.
And then you can choose a totally different architecture than a commercial ISP could operate: no network admission barriers, mesh networks, etc.
Instead we have monopolies that do what all monopolies do in a capitalist organization of the economy: they rent-seek, spend their time and money on lobbying to legislatively exclude competition (eg [2]), do the bare minimum and take public money to roll out broadband but then just not do it (eg [3].
The Internet is the US is objectively awful for most people by the standard of other developed economies [4].
It's ridiculous that people still defend this system.
[1]: https://qz.com/1996234/the-best-broadband-in-the-us-is-in-ch...
[2]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/02/isp-lobby-has-al...
[3]: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/06/veriz...
[4]: https://broadbandnow.com/report/2018-fcc-international-data-...