@cjd @Demosthenes this kindah makes me think "nationalize". I just really doubt what is basically single infrastructure can be competed with. The risk is just creating appearance of market, with the cost of lots of middlemen, sales and legal departments.

That said, every locality has it's own infrastructure, so like at what level to govern that is a choice. Running the internet at the whole-US level is a bad idea.

@cjd @Demosthenes
in Poland, we have a regulation that forces the dominant ISP in a particular area to offer to lease some of their infrastructure (underground cable pipes, cabinets, coax cables in multi-family buildings, and maybe even dark fiber) to competitors at a fair price.

I don't know how fair price is defined, but it seems to work...

@cjd @Demosthenes
also, back in the day when landline phone and ADSL were popular, TPSA (the Polish ex-state-owned telco) would allow other ISPs to connect to their ATM network, so you could reach different ISPs by entering the right VPI and VCI in your ADSL modem, without the need for the ISP to own the landline, the DSLAM, or any access network between the local exchanges AFAIK.

There were also virtual landline phone operators, but dunno how these worked.

@wolf480pl @Demosthenes@qoto.org
That is really cool. ISPs have been legally required to do local loop unbundling, but AFAIK that really only means they have to rent space at the DSLAM rack and rent telephone loops...

@cjd on one hand it's cool, on the other hand it meant that for a long time, nobody except TPSA bothered to build out their network...