Except that nationalization is part of the plan, under the guise of "affordable municipal broadband". A government owned near-monopoly replacing a private one.
So what are you talking about?
If the other companies can't compete because their prices are too high, well sucks to be them.
The only thing that matters is the consumers.
It's no longer true that the US lags behind on Internet access speeds.
The US is ranked #10 in the world in average Internet access speeds, just barely behind Denmark and Japan. The countries that rank in front of the US are mostly tiny population wise. We're far faster than eg France, or Australia. Competitively, US access speeds have improved substantially in the last ten years.
Here's who ranks in front of the US: South Korea, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Hong Kong, Finland, Switzerland, Singapore, Japan.
Here is who the US ranks in front of: Canada, Australia, France, Germany, Russia, Brazil, China, Mexico, Taiwan, New Zealand, India, Indonesia, Netherlands, Romania, Britain, Czech, Belgium, Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Austria, Poland, Italy, Greece, Israel, Turkey, Saudi Arabia - and all of Africa + all of Latin America.
The US has 2x the average access speeds of Italy, and neary 2x the speeds of France.
Within 24 to 36 months, the US will likely pass Japan on average access speeds.
This is a massive improvement over where the US was ten years ago and it's getting better faster than most countries.
The US ranks #8 on percentage of connections above 15mbps (48%), just behind Sweden and in front of Denmark. The US ranks #10 on percentage above 25mbps, with dramatically faster growth in that segment than anyone else in the top 10. Between Q1 2016 and Q1 2017, the US saw a 65% leap in % of connections over 25mbps; Finland, ranked #9, by comparison saw a 31% improvement.
So not only is the US killing it on access speeds now, particularly for a massive country of 330 million people, it's improving far faster than most other comparable nations.
Here's the Q12017 pdf:
https://www.akamai.com/fr/fr/multimedia/documents/state-of-t...
It is self contradictory logic.
Price controls, such as what happens in the electricy and water market might cause that. But the government getting into the game, and spending more money on infrastructure wouldn't....
Except this isn't true. Almost all the existing broadband infrastructure was built with private money, not taxpayer money.
$103 billion is "excess profits." I.e. if you pretend that telcos should receive the same profit margins as water companies, during a period of massive growth in demand for their product, then you can count any profits above that level as "taxpayer money paid to the telco." By that logic, taxpayers are giving Apple hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies.
$78 billion in "excessive depreciation." If you assume that depreciation schedules during the POTS era should be the same as during a period where everyone was replacing their networks to build broadband, then you can count the "excessive depreciation" as "taxpayer money paid to telcos."
If you actually read the origin of the number, nowhere will you find reference to checks written. The gripe is about deregulation in and of itself--the very idea that the government should not be deciding what prices to charge for what services. That kind of thinking is totally outside the mainstream among telecom regulators in the developed world. Every major European country deregulated their telcos in the 1990s and 2000s. The government in Germany or France doesn't sit there and decide how much broadband service should cost, and call everything above that "excess profits."