Within months your privately held broadband provider is going to be selling your private info to the highest bidder.
Why we have privately owned public communications lines is utterly beyond me. I do not see why a substantial portion of every dollar I spend on internet has to go to marketing and executive compensation. Completely infuriating.
The economic reason that internet hasn't spread to every rural household is because there isn't enough demand (in terms of money, not general interest) to pull suppliers out there. If we're going to assume that privacy has value, then allowing providers to have access to consumers' privacy would increase the demand and could help reduce the burden on municipalities or companies to extend broadband. But if we're going to begin every discussion with privacy being protected by default, then costs are going to be higher since the customer will be forced to absorb the costs.
The money argument has nuances. I pay $90 a month for 2 Mbps DSL. From the viewpoint of the phone company, there already is competition for fiber -- they can get $90 a month from me and pay their shareholders a dividend larger than earnings (in fact, pay a dividend even when earnings are negative!) Maybe they could charge $120 a month for fiber, but they could not charge a lot more than that, but from the viewpoint of their investment, they are only getting an extra $30 a month.
Now, a newcomer could get $120 a month, but they would split the market, and some people are going to look for the low cost solution, particularly when the profits the phone company is making are already insane and they could be offering the same service for more like $50.
Probably the most practical situation (what is supposed to happen in my valley) is to work with an incumbent (Charter) to extend service to less profitable areas, because frankly, Charter makes money hand-over-first in all the rest of the areas.
That alone isn't enough to explain the dysfunction. If NYC and its environs were more or less homogeneous it would dominate the state and the red parts wouldn't matter. The problem is that there's a three way split -- NYC is 42% (but parts of each of the outer boros are more suburban than urban), Nassau/Suffolk/Westchester is 20%, and the rest of the state is the other 38%. The suburbs of NYC hold the swing votes and are some of the most corrupt parts of an already corrupt state.