What's preventing it from happening then? What needs to change so that more ISP businesses thrive and everyone has multiple ISPs to choose from? It's not clear to me which lever needs to be pulled to make it happen
In particular, the way you do this is that the state installs conduit (think big empty pipes) in the road and then anyone can string fiber through it. The cost of doing this once the conduit is installed is dramatically lower than each company digging up the street themselves, especially if the government can refrain from charging oppressive fees for access to the conduit, and then you can feasibly have dozens to hundreds of last mile ISPs.
I disagree. The point about the road analogy is that each house only gets one road and the trucking companies aren't responsible for any last mile infrastructure. Multiple trucking companies can share one road by following sensible rules. Multiple ISP's can share fibre infrastructure by following sensible rules.
If TCP/IP followed the ISO model I would phrase it as "the city is responsible for layer 2, the ISP for layer 3 and content providers for layer 4 and up".
The trouble with that is you then involve the government with the technology.
Suppose we did as you say 30 years ago. The government would install phone lines and use DSL to carry internet traffic for competing ISPs.
The performance of DSL was fine 30 years ago, but now it's slow, and no ISP is allowed to install anything faster because in your system the government has a monopoly. The government could upgrade it, but that costs money and getting the government to spend money upgrading infrastructure has been a recurring problem. So now you're stuck with DSL.
Whereas if the government just runs conduit, and then Verizon is using DSL from 30 years ago, Sonic can come in at any time and install fiber. Which spurs Verizon to install fiber because now they have competition.
You want the monopoly to be made as narrow as possible. But the natural monopoly isn't layer 2, it's not even the entirety of layer 1. It's the road, and the high cost of digging the trench. Once you have the conduit, the cost of having a hundred ISPs string fiber through it is minor, so doing that should be open to competition.
Maintaining the road system on an inadequate budget is a lot harder than maintaining a fibre optic system, and yet municipalities do a passable job at that. They do a heck of a lot better at their jobs than cable companies do of maintaining their network.
That's a major point of my analogy -- having the road system being anything but a monopoly is stupid, yet the road system has largely destroyed the railway companies which are not a monopoly.
> Maintaining the road system on an inadequate budget is a lot harder than maintaining a fibre optic system, and yet municipalities do a passable job at that.
They do a pretty crappy job of it, in general. The relevant metric here would be congestion, i.e. are they maintaining adequate capacity to prevent people from being stuck in traffic?
There are a lot of arguments people will make for how they should be preventing traffic congestion (e.g. add lanes vs. facilitate more housing construction so people aren't driving as far), but on the question of whether they've succeeded in preventing traffic congestion, the answer is no.
They also spend rather a lot of money on it.
> That's a major point of my analogy -- having the road system being anything but a monopoly is stupid, yet the road system has largely destroyed the railway companies which are not a monopoly.
But the main reason for this is politics. Trucker unions see rail as competition so they lobby for laws that keep people using trucks. Rail has a significantly lower cost per ton but projects to build new rail lines etc. are opposed because they would compete with truck routes.
1. Make any exclusivity agreements illegal. There should be zero ways for any non-wireless[1] company to block competition.
2. Strong push towards building communal fiber ("private trucks, public roads" analogy).
3. Need to do something about NIMBYs that block running the lines. Not sure what exactly, but surely there must be some legal ways.
4. Tax incentives for ISP startups are probably a necessity to help with the the initial costs.
Something like this, although I'm not sure this is a complete list - I'm not particularly aware about intricacies of starting an ISP in the US so there's probably something I'm missing.
