You can still have local governments not give ISPs local monopoly over laid cables, but you can also have net neutrality, which says that companies shouldn't be messing with the traffic that passes through their pipes. The two aren't mutually exclusive.
Also, some have mentioned in other similar threads that sometimes the monopoly is (sort of) natural because no other ISP even wants to lay the cables in a certain area. I do believe that to be true, but I don't think it's "case closed," either.
Many other countries have solved this issue by either mandating that whoever is laying the cables would then have to license them to competitors (which could also bring them their return on investment faster), or they could have a public-private partnership, where the government invests alongside the initial company that is laying the cables, to reduce its costs, and then similarly they license them to new competitors later on.
Sure, only 21 states codify telecom monopolies into law, but in the rest without those laws, how much more choice is there? Let's not count the states where the government paid for dark fiber which is leased to the corporations to provide service for customers, because that seems to be taking the correct route. If that were to happen in other states, it would necessarily require either (1) taking over the telecom infrastructure and leasing it back to them, or (2) expensive buyouts of the telecom's infrastructure. It seems simpler and cheaper to regulate a monopoly in this case.
EDIT: Correction: the laws in these 21 states don't codify monopolies per se, but they make it impossible for cities to build their own infrastructure on some absurd basis that the cities are anti-competitive with respect to corporations:
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/qkvn4x/the-21-law...
EDIT2: Ignore any argument I was trying to make, as I may or may not have contradicted myself based on my mental shortcomings with regard to concentration and lack of medication.