You can auction off the universal service obligation to willing bidders without having a state owned enterprise with a government monopoly.

> Either way, from a national policy standpoint there are very good reasons to subsidize rural areas for basic infrastructure services like mail and internet.

Please tell me a few.

Sure!

Rural areas extract and produce many resources that urban areas depend on. Agriculture, fishing, oil, gas, uranium, wood, maple syrup, etc.

You can’t get workforces to live in those places or businesses to operate there if there’s no roads, internet, mail, schools, hospitals, etc (or if those things are prohibitively expensive).

Don’t forget that subsidy doesn’t always mean the difference between whether it’s expensive or not, it can also mean the difference between having and not having.

Another reason is that too much regional wealth inequality can be bad for national stability. It can lead to things like civil wars and unrest.