Municipal fiber exists in some places, but not most. It’s actually fairly common up here in the Pacific Northwest. Dozens of towns dotted around the map have their own municipal fiber networks, but Ziply serves more customers than all of them combined. Thus I say that the free market is fixing the problem that the government created. Another good example is Starlink. They provide service to millions in very rural areas that are out of reach of other ISPs.

When we paid for national broadband access here in the US, it was not for fiber to the home. It was for DSL. Worse, the FCC measured coverage not by service address as it does today, but by census district. The phone companies merely had to assert that they could provide service to an address in the district and the FCC would count the whole district as covered. The districts aren’t very big, so in dense areas that was not a bad estimation. In less dense areas it was just a giant loophole. They could provide service to one house on the edge of the district and not bother with the hundreds of homes miles away out in the countryside. Officially we got exactly what we paid for.

As you say we could still nationalize these fiber networks and stitch them together into a real national network. Of course they don’t all use exactly the same technology, and it would be a huge political fight, but in principle I could see a government agency gradually buying networks from the ISPs and integrating them. Of course you know that if Trump proposes it then the Democrats will immediately oppose it on the general principle that Trump proposed it.