>Which proves my point. It was not cost that prevents multiple sets of wires being laid. It's regulation, and frankly rather poor management by the government.
Do you look at the picture I linked, and think this is a preferable end state over some extra regulatory cost? That you would rather have those sets of cables all over the place and think the government is preventing this better state?
If you do, that's an opinion you can have, but I also think we have fundamentally different views of the world.
> Do you look at the picture I linked, and think this is a preferable end state over some extra regulatory cost?
Alternatively, we can dispense with the false dichotomy (along with the presumption that the technical constraints of 19th-century telegraph lines are applicable to modern telecom) and identify ways to incentivize competitive markets without dealing with externaliies by imposing regulatory barriers that ultimately generate oligopolies.
OTOH, the modern version of your picture would probably consist of dozens of fiber lines all running through the same network of underground conduit, so the most direct answer to your question is "yes, absolutely".
> Do you look at the picture I linked, and think this is a preferable end state over some extra regulatory cost? That you would rather have those sets of cables all over the place and think the government is preventing this better state?
Yes, I saw the picture. It means it is not prohibitively expensive to run multiple wires.
Yes, it is unsightly. But there are many, many ways to run multiple signals today. Technology has advanced a great deal. For example, one trench or pipe can provide space for a large number of wires. The community can provide a pipe for such purposes, like they provide pipes for other purposes. Or the providers can agree to share a wire. Or use microwaves. Or the cell towers. Or Starlink. And on and on.
> For example, one trench or pipe can provide space for a large number of wires. The community can provide a pipe for such purposes, like they provide pipes for other purposes.
Congrats on describing municipal broadband while arguing against government involvement.
Nothing in the preceding comment remotely resembles any proposal for municipal broadband. Even if a municipal government were doing the work he assigns to "the community", that work consists of maintaining a system of conduit within which other parties can run their own fiber lines connected to their own networks, and wouldn't at all imply that the municipality would own or operate any of the physical network infrastructure, nor operate ISP services.
And there's no necessity that role of "the community" be handed off to a municipal government, either. People can and do solve complex coordination problems without relying on political authority all the time -- "the community" could easily be a non-profit organization, a mutual owned by local residents, or just a series of reciprocal agreements to maintain the baseline infrastructure needed for other parties to run cables, without any municipal government being involved.
The idea that any non-trivial coordination problem can only be solved by centralized political authority is one of the principal drivers of corruption and stagnation in modern society, and is itself one of the main causes of competitive markets degenerating into monopolies or oligopolies.
Do you look at the picture I linked, and think this is a preferable end state over some extra regulatory cost? That you would rather have those sets of cables all over the place and think the government is preventing this better state?
If you do, that's an opinion you can have, but I also think we have fundamentally different views of the world.