It was & is one of the most stunning activist court decisions to have hit the US ever. Big companies sued, saying fiber was expensive & that they should have sole control over next gen telecommunications technology & the courts ignored the legislative act & handed incumbent powers total control. Revilesome; one of the biggest constraints in US infrastructure in general.
The FCC has been busy 5hese past couple years unwinding remaining requirements for dark fiber & other remaining protections. I somewhat care but the obliteration of last mile protections that enabled competitive carriers to exist at all makes the overall market so unavailable & locked up that it's less relevant.
It’s basically combining the short-sighted greed of corporations with the long term potential energy of infra. The combo is incredibly powerful.
Governments typically suck at ops, pricing etc, but digging and drawing lines in the sand they can be pretty good at. Corporations without competition always suck, it’s like having an athlete without a sport. Even if they start out fine, they deteriorate on the couch into an agitated and lazy asshole, monopolizing the remote.
In many parts of Europe, this model is working so well that there are 2-3 competitors that are all good and cheap. Unlike (here) in the US where there is only one, depending on your address, which sucks and is incredibly overpriced.
It's quite a clever system that uses market greed to incentivize building. It's the same system as railroads, imagine if railroads could not share tracks with each other.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrangements_between_railroads...
Some places also vote to have the city or town connect with Fiber which then puts tax money aside for it.
In many places it is the power companies that run fiber and they are mostly partially or fully state owned. The lagest ISP also has the state as the majority share holder.
It's whether you want to pay through it via tax dollars or directly.
As it stimulates the economy similar to how laying new train track does.
It's the same for power, one or two companies lay the cable, myriad others sell the service.
In Italy, nobody would lay fiber to stunt the competition.