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> Even if another company had to lay their own cables, that happens and isn't impossible.

But highly improbable, because it's very expensive to lay cable and hard to recoup the investment. There are countless articles on the Internet as to why this is so. One from 2014 has this poignant sentence:

> There is a ray of hope, though. Just this month, FCC chair Tom Wheeler indicated that the agency might be willing to step in and help do away with all the state-level laws blocking municipal broadband projects.

Not bloody likely.

https://consumerist.com/2014/05/10/why-starting-a-competitor...

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The high cost is due to regulations, laws, permits, and lawsuits. Actually laying cable is not that expensive.

Those things are certainly a big chunk. But burrying a wire is expensive.

Maybe not all, but many of those regulations and permits are there for a reason. The vast majority of the population cares way, way more about not having construction in their yard than they do about enabling a competitive market for ISPs.

If you try to dig up all the sidewalks and driveways on any given block block, most of the residents will raise holy hell with their local elected representatives and try to shut you down any way they can. Much of this regulation is in fact the will of the people, and I'm not sure it's wrong. It is a significant disruption to people's property, and it's silly to lay redundant network infrastructure. It's a bad solution to a stupid problem that only exists because of ideological intransigence.

In my neighborhood, and for miles around it, the internet cable is stapled to the telephone poles. Every few years they pull it off and staple another one on that can handle more bandwidth.

A while back a competitor appeared and tried to run another wire, but it got so mired in permits, regulations, and lawsuits that it gave up. It wasn't the cost of laying the cable.

> The high cost is due to regulations, laws, permits, and lawsuits.

No, it's due to private property owners. The regulations are mostly dealing with what it takes to bypass then, but in libertarian utopia, those regulations would be gone and the cost would be higher, not lower, for a new cable layer.

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