The problem here is, unironically, caused by the government getting involved. Many of these companies are granted legal monopoles in their service areas. If someone dares to start a competitor, the incumbent harasses them with lawsuits to try to shut them out. The free market isn't all sunshine and rainbows (and natural monopolies like infrastructure are a place where it frequently fails), but the market is not particularly free in this case.

No the problem is that it just doesn't work no matter how much faith you have in the free market. The whole point is to get over this crazy ideology and think rationally about it, the problem isn't "caused by the government getting involved" it's caused by people who think like you, running the government. The article explains this very well you should read it:

> True capitalism requires competition. But infrastructure is a natural monopoly. If you treat it like a regular consumer product, you don’t get competition. You get waste, or you get a monopoly.

> The Swiss model understands this. They built the infrastructure once, as a shared, neutral asset, and then let the market compete on the services that run over it.