There are many solutions to that. The EU solution is to require all member states to regulate local loop unbundling, so any provider can rent access at regulated rates to connect their equipment at the local exchanges and get a raw connection to the subscribers.

How exactly you manage the company that owns the last mile infrastructure can greatly affect how well this works, but even in the UK which has done this quite poorly, there are pretty much no place where you can't pick from dozens of ISPs.

It still imposes limits as to the maximum capacity, based on the upgrade schedules of OpenReach (BT) which controls the phone/adsl network. There are some problems. E.g. due to the way regulation is structured in the UK, BT frequently gets accused of milking OpenReach for money rather than invest in upgrades at the pace they ought to (basically because they earn far more from OpenReach than from their own ISP). One solution to this type of problem would be to regulate dividends from the line operator so that there is a limit set based on the amount invested in upgrades to make it pay to reinvest and/or to allow them a higher profit margin on upgraded services for a period.

OpenReach's wholesale prices are regulated roughly based on a cost+ basis, and are open and published on their websites for everyone to read.

Overall it does mean the ISP market is quite competitive, and entry costs for new ISPs are guaranteed to be relatively low, as e.g. there are "backhaul" services available that allow an ISP to get a connection to one or a few points in BTs network and have them hand over IP connections to subscribers at that point rather than having to do local loop unbundling across the country.

> Didn't the lack of providers in the majority of the US happen because municipal governments got to regulate rights-of-way for installing infrastructure (copper telephone and cable wires, fiber optic cables)?

Yes.

LA 2015 Election:

https://ballotpedia.org/Paul_Krekorian

AT&T - $14,400 Verizon - $7,753

2 of his top 5 contributors were the local ISPs.

Unfortunately there aren't any good data sources that provide country-wide coverage of this information but I'd be willing to bet its a very common practice.

It seems to me that we're replacing bribing at the local level with bribing at the national level. This will make it much easier for large ISPs to thwart competition and defer innovation. Just another unintended consequence of government "solutions".

> It seems to me that we're replacing bribing at the local level with bribing at the national level. This will make it much easier for large ISPs to thwart competition and defer innovation. Just another unintended consequence of government "solutions".

I'm curious, if you believe bribery works at the national level as well as the local level, how do regulations that are pro-consumer get passed?

In practice, I've found that the reason it works locally is almost no one is involved in local elections besides corporate sponsors. We literally had 10% turnout in my city, for instance.

Similarly, loop unbundling and other competition increasing regulation are almost always passed at the national level in basically every country that has such.

Regulations that are pro-consumer are inacted in favor of companies that have departments and expertise dealing in such regimes. "We'll go along with regulation X if you put regulation Y in that works in our favor". Regulatory capture was a big contributor to our near finanical collapse in '08. No one cares or thinks about the burdens regulations place on start-ups, despite all the "innovation" speak around NN.

So your argument is non-US ISPs are advantaged by greater competition because they get Y but US ISPs are not because they are too incompetent to clone foreign regulation in a way that benefits them?

Hint: There isn't a rebuttal you can make because if it is true, then your argument is false. If it is false, it is an admission that federal regulations do actually function to increase competition to the benefit of consumers. There isn't a third option.

You don't seem to acknowledge the existence of private sector collusion either.

What "foreign regulation" should we clone?

Suggestion: don't use circular logic when debating.

I acknowledge private sector collusion, and the answer is more competition. More regulation (usually influenced by the existing players) harms market entry. You need to constantly update the X & Y regulations so that start-ups have a fighting chance. That's painfully slow right now.

Yeah, obviously it's a problem with the concept of government because companies can bribe/"sponsor"politicians. Is there too much regulation or too little?

Too much overly specific and outdated regulation, and that's by design. What looks like a good, pro consumer law actually often has the backing of large corporations. Doesn't matter what party you belong to. Regulation abuse at the local level can at least be contained and voters have more power to change things or move. Not so much at the national level. Government should focus only on the things that the market cannot solve: public safety and enforcement of contracts and rights. The problem is that much of the public thinks that the government has and should complete control over the market in order to protect them, as if government is made up only of angels and wise men. The market players know more about the market than the government does, so often they are tricked or bribed into favoring one market participant over another. The only way to solve it is for the public to realize what the government does best and stop putting their personal saviors into positions of power, where their inexperience/lack of knowledge/greed/shortsightedness causes them to write bad/mediocre laws on top of existing bad & mediocre laws.

> Yeah, obviously it's a problem with the concept of government because companies can bribe/"sponsor"politicians. Is there too much regulation or too little?

You are over simplifying it.

The regulation is being done at the wrong level of government and is entirely the wrong regulation at the local & state levels.

Construction season is bad enough maintaining just the infrastructure in the ground already. So that one makes sense to me.