The Government does not build those.

Because the ISP corporations have sued the government (successfully) when it's attempted.

And 'successfully' includes a completed lawsuit and/or dragging out the proceedings so long that it costs the taxpayers too much to continue.

With few exceptions, the government doesn’t build or operate power lines in the US.

Actually they often don't. In the US, we had the Rural Electrification Act (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_Electrification_Act) that brought electricity into rural areas, but these places often still have wells, septic tanks, and gas tanks.

The government doesn't build water, sewer, or gas in many parts of the country! Where I live, less than an hour from DC and maybe 5 minutes from a Whole Foods, we don't have gas lines at all, we use propane and fuel oil. We got public water and sewer only in 2015, and each house is paying off a $30,000 assessment for that. Most of the areas around us are reliant on wells and septic systems. Ironically, we have had fiber since 2008 or so. As to electric--most of that was built back when labor was relatively very cheap and tons of people were unemployed. We couldn't build the national electric grid today, for the same reason we couldn't build the New York subway today.

ISPs will sue saying the government should not compete with business.

Because they're people too, and it winds up being profitable for everyone.

It took New Deal politicians dragging the electric companies kicking and screaming to get rural eras electrified, because the companies didn't think there'd be enough usage to justify the wiring. Turns out, once it's available, people use it, and it was profitable.

Not all the jobs are in the cities. I'd imagine rural areas have a lot of large-scale farming that would be expensive to do in the city.

Tons of people also grow up in rural areas; access to high speed internet would probably be useful for their development and maybe even innovation in these areas.

Personally I see high speed internet as a way to integrate people who may not be geographically close to each other; this includes those living in rural areas.

"Jobs are in the cities"

Yeah, except for agriculture, energy production, mining, large manufacturing, warehousing and other critical industries that city dwellers like to forget exist. All of these require people, and those people need to live somewhere near their place of work.

You could say the same thing about any government subsidy. Why subsidize the poor when the wealthy generate most of the tax revenue, why should single people subsidize children, etc.

Are jobs in the cities anymore? Jobs downtown in an expensive office building for information workers to basically do the same work they're doing at home right now seems like an artificial and outdated constraint.

Why are we propping up concentrated urban cores with their congestion, pollution, expense/inflation?

I don't know why these sort of things don't work on a reimbursement basis. Instead of just handing over a huge chunk of money, why shouldn't telecoms be required to submit invoices for reimbursement on qualifying work? It would ensure taxpayers were only paying for work actually completed, not empty promises.