One reason cable companies won’t willingly compete against each other

Back when oil was getting to be useful, lots of people discovered it. Usually, it was in a remote area. The only way to make money off it was to get it to a refinery and then the market. Standard Oil bullied and bribed the railroads into giving them preferential rates and charging high rates for competitors. It's exactly like what cable companies would like to do by subverting net neutrality, give preferential treatment to the traffic that profits them most. It's just information instead of oil, which is even more insidious since it can control the public discourse.

Cable is a network technology with value defined somewhere between Sarnof's, Metcalfe's, or Tilly-Odlyzko's laws. Scale, and dominating local coverage, matter.

Oil is an extractive mineral resource with very low direct costs vs. use value. Absent some form of central contrl, the price has tended to fall far too low. In the aftermath of the East Texas oilfield discovery of 1930 (the biggest on the mainland lower 48), prices fell fist to $0.13/bbl, then to $0.02/bbl. That's barrels, not gallons.

The governors of Texas and Oklahoma called out their state national guards, and the Rangers in Texas, and seized wellheads at gunpoint to cut supply. The quota system imposed, run by the highly innaccurately named Texas Railraod Commission, lasted until 1972. Daniel Yergin's book The Prize covers this in detail.

A similar control program applied to strategic minerals was created after WWII, originally called the Hobard list, and remains in effect as part of the Defense National Stockpile Center.

Raw material and networking economics differ.

Setting up infrastructure is extremely expensive especially in cities where allot of the European population lives. The US has a different problem where only 4% of the population lives in a major cities so ISP's have to lay allot of infrastructure and historically the more or less remain around their original starting zones and creep out very slowly.

Fiber/Coax infrastructure in the US should be done on a state and municipal levels and then offered to ISP's at a fixed price to recoup the costs via a tender based on the cost to the end consumer

Municipal broadband just replaces one monopoly with another -- one that doesn't even have profit as a requirement, since it is also a taxing authority.

In other words, the same number of subscribers now have to pay for 4x the infrastructure costs.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Broadband_Network

As an off-topic aide: was "I'm not a communist" tongue in cheek? Or would such an infrastructure project be actually seen as "communist" &/or undesirable just for it's oversight?

Edit: terminology, link

I think that you'd see the same phenomenon as in any country which socialised an industry: at first things are — as you guess — much the same, because the same people keep coming to work in the same buildings, operating the same machines according to the same processes &c. But the rate of innovation lowers, and eventually you get the equivalent of a Soviet grocery store (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOBFMMbUFI8): something much better than what you had before, but nowhere near as good as you could have had.

So after a decade or two of municipal broadband, you can expect that you'll have better broadband than when you started, but far, far, far worse broadband than where there is competition.

Now, if the debate is between a public and a private monopoly, I honestly don't know which is worse. Possibly the public monopoly, because its employees are unfireable, but — I don't know.

Except... that is all they have. All they have ever had. And as the population has risen, they have no budget to deploy more servers to meet demand, so every night the speeds crash and you have intermittent outages. Especially on weekends. They are running 20 year old switches that have to handle Netflix loads on a nightly basis.

So you go to town council meetings to find out whats up and it turns out that over 15 years later they still owe some ~3 million on the original bill of 22 million, and the whole town is 10 million in the red (with a population of 3 thousand) so it cannot spend money on practically anything.

So main street is like driving on a cobble trail with potholes that go unfilled for years, and school taxes are the highest in five surrounding boroughs and its still not enough for them.

Sure, you can be certain they got ripped off with whomever they bought the original deployment from back then, given its just coax and not even fiber, and the municipal ISP is only a small piece of general budget mismanagement, but it is a reflection on how bad in general politicians are at budgeting, and nobody should ever be surprised when someone cannot make a reasonable budget when they are doing it with other peoples money and they have no consequences to themselves besides possible reelection issues.

IMO, it is just a more fundamental reflection that politics and political office as it is arranged in the states is both systemically intentional and attracts people who are not technical, not actuarial, and often lawyers and other "people" persons who can talk big to get elected and then go into an echo-chamber of self-reinforcing superiority with all the other elected officials such that they never attract the kind of critical thinking or knowledge to approach anything close to municipal... anything, really, with any degree of competence. They just defer to their friends friend at a teleco wiring company or a water treatment operator or a civil engineering corps and get turned into a money faucet for terrible results. I'm not saying every government has to behave that way, but at least from my observations all the ones I have been under have, at best, been incompetent, and have often been of malicious intent towards its own citizens at their expense for corporate donors and insiders to their social circle. But it is certainly systemically intentional.

I don't think cable companies are at a Nash equilibrium, but they may be at other forms of equilibrium that I'm not familiar with. Also this game is iterated so there are other (crucial) dynamics at play that I am not familiar with.

This assumes that all costs stay proportionately the same, _and_ that there is no other competitive advantage than price.