I'm nowhere near a socialist, but government intervention is a perfectly reasonable way to deal with natural monopolies. How do you think Northern European and Asian countries pulled so far ahead of the US on this?
Thus as there can be no competition the network itself should have public ownership, and then there can be competition of services run on top of that network. UPS vs FedEx; various companies that sell electricity/gas over someone else's network; ISPs that run on the phone network, etc.
I'm pretty sure that the ISP sector is not constrained in any way by a natural monopoly. Take a look at the Internet in Romania wikipedia article[0]. In my view telecom companies have grown to disproportionate sizes, almost everywhere in the world, and this has given them enough power to buy the lawmakers. A lot of legislation has been passed to protect them, state laws, national laws and even international laws. So no, I think that the telecom sector has been intervened enough since its creation, what the consumer needs is to completely deregulate it, and to let the free market work its magic.
I don't know, this is just pure speculation. What I know for sure is that the reason to protect companies that exploit "natural monopolies" is to protect the consumer. And right now, the protection of these companies is hurting the consumer, more than helping him.
Yeah, in an ideal situation the state would be able to provide "free" internet at a really low cost. But that solution overlooks this huge problem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgJ644LPL6g
In this case, I suggest you model rural America's density, and the cost to lay down a wire, or fiber, or whatever in a town, along with all the needed infrastructure.
Then I suggest you model the financial returns of that investment under conditions where there are multiple players.
If you do this well, you'll find that as you add competition, you add marketing cost, and you're also forced to amortize the fixed infrastructure costs over smaller and smaller numbers of consumers. And you'll also find that whoever was first to market in that area has a dominant position from a game theoretical perspective, and can make moves that would make it essentially impossible for any competitor to enter the marketplace profitably.
Natural monopolies aren't made-up things.
Since these regulations occur at a local level, some of the rules are more effective than others, and some of them are straight-up corrupt. But the common case is not government creating monopolies, but rather government restraining them by regulating them.