There is criticism on how Germany organized the ISP market going around for ages.

Ironically we had a monopoly for building wired connections - that was run by the government.

Then someone had the great idea to open this market for the private sector. Since then we kind of lice in the stoneage in terms of fast internet.

I heart that Scandinavian countries have a similar approach for what is described in the article. Didn't know Switzerland also does it right. That's the way to do it, will work for Germany as well.

> That's the way to do it, will work for Germany as well.

Yes, but please think of the Telekom and Vodafone et al shareholders..

Even if those companies did, eventually, relent to implement it that way, they would possibly find a way to link it to a predatory 36 month subscription or some other ridiculous terms to keep their rent-seeking.

In the meantime, the only option I have in my neck of the woods, is DSL at 4Mbits/s down - 0.5 up. At around 40 euro per month, I believe? Or Starlink..

Part of the reason German internet is slow is because German telecom didn't want to invest in fiber. And arguably had it remained a state monopoly they also didn't want to do it. They spent a lot of time on super-vectoring and all this copper optimization.

Now if the German government had forced and paid for the needed investment to upgrade Germany to fiber quickly, yes such a monopoly could have done it quickly. But it seems unlikely to me that this would have happened as an alternative to privatization.

That's always the thing with government run, you can just assume that the government run thing would have done the smartest best possible thing. But this is not always the case and depends on many factors.

Arguably the privatization was better then a badly run monopoly. At lest this way in some regions people could escape the monopoly better.