The difficulty is that most of this competitive dynamic is already provided by IP itself (remember when you got your email address from your ISP?), and what remains is basically the physical layer technology which is exactly where the worries lie about stagnation.

There is a small angle where several ISPs can compete around customer service, data caps, equipment rental, business support, price margin, etc. While then forming larger units that put pressure on the physical provider to not stagnate the underlying infrastructure.

On the other hand I've got municipal fiber, and it just works. Great friendly local support (at least from what I understand, I don't really call them), no data caps, the price has stayed fixed for it's whole existence. I don't see any reason to want another layer on top of that, as it would only make all of those things worse.

The incumbent coax provider ("cable compay") still exists. If the municipal fiber provider stagnates on technology, then they could theoretically step up, right?. But given they had been coasting on a monopoly for decades (the other option being DSL), and that their service is still slower than the municipal gigabit (now deployed for a decade), I think that is giving them too much credit! In fact I've seen more talk about next-gen connection speeds from the municipal fiber provider.

For all the marketing about "free market competition", large corpos can be less innovative and responsive than small governments. So for the foreseeable future, I see no reason to not just voice my support for municipal fiber everywhere.

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rayiner 2 hours ago | parent [-]

But what about large governments? Japan has amazing internet service, and NTT is mostly private (with the government retaining only 1/3 ownership).

I would trust my county to deliver my fiber internet. All my government services work great. I literally marvel every time I visit our municipal dump, which is cleaner and mode efficient than my home country of Bangladesh. But I wouldn’t trust most of the other counties I’ve lived in before to do it (Baltimore, Wilmington DE, Chicago, etc.).

	▲	mindslight 23 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Given that the argument about municipal fiber centers around a dynamic of large corpos preventing competition from small municipalities (by lobbying for state level prohibitions, etc) that seems besides the point. When cities have the population density to support multiple competing Internet providers with decent physical layers and non-extractionary terms, then there generally doesn't seem to be much of a call for the city to provide its own services. Furthermore cities that are incompetent about deploying infrastructure are going to be similarly incompetent at facilitating the permit process for private infrastructure - giving governmentesque incumbent providers a hold over a captive market regardless. So while this is a general problem that deserve its own exploration, it wouldn't seem to have much bearing on Internet access specifically.