Meanwhile in Romania people just put cables up wherever they wanted and had 100s of bootleg ISPs and now they have the fastest/cheapest internet in the world.
Guess we need more ivy league "educated" professional experts to solve this problem for us, as is the american way.
When a new industry develops, usually with totally new technology, we let entrepreneurs run wild. They don’t need permits, making new companies is easy, they file patents, and it’s a land rush.
Once the industry matures and ossifies, and the winners go public and the pension funds and sovereign wealth and retail and everyone gets their retirement in, the American system begins to protect the incumbents.
The government passes laws that are ostensibly neutral but are written hand-in-hand with lobbyists to ensure the incumbents remain. The incumbents get subsidies, they donate to politicians of both parties, they become embedded into the fabric of corporate America.
America is crony capitalist once the players are established. However for small firms and new technologies, it’s wildcats and free markets. VCs not only provide capital but act as the nexus between the crony capitalists and the anointed new firms for acquisition, muscle in legal disputes, credibility, sustaining enterprise deals, etc.
I would heavily reform the system to be less crony capitalist in numerous ways. Despite this, the American system is beating all other large countries by a lot.
I always figured there was more value in the easements (rights to access and run lines in property) than the actual physical plant on a lot of the legacy telecom companies. They had to do a lot of legal and commercial effort to get those for POTS phones, and trying to reproduce that effort for fibre seems near impossible.