You have Internet choice in most of Europe if you count DSL, but people in the U.S. tend to dismiss DSL out of hand. Excluding DSL, in German you've got cable ISPs which largely don't compete in the same geographic area, and almost no fiber penetration. France is similar, though with more fiber (but still less than in the U.S.).

yeah in Japan you have major net providers and there is even a difference between the network you rent and the ISP. For example you can be on a NTT fiber line but use a different ISP on that line.

> For example you can be on a NTT fiber line but use a different ISP on that line

as an american living in a major city, this exceeds my wildest dreams of internet service.

It's the difference between a regulated pro-consumer free market, and a lobbyist controlled market presenting a duopoly as a free market.

It's one of the negative consequences of mainstream media / political free market rhetoric considering regulation harmful.

The difference is that NTT lost money for years offering wholesale fiber below cost: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.489... (pages 11, 16). It could do that because it has a national near-monopoly in the wholesale space (it get some money from every subscriber, no matter what ISP they use), Japan's economy offers much lower returns than the U.S.'s (making low return infrastructure investments relatively more attractive), and NTT is 1/3 owned by the government (which ordered it to deploy fiber, regardless of profits).

> It's one of the negative consequences of mainstream media / political free market rhetoric considering regulation harmful.

Well regulation can be harmful if it protects the incumbents and prevents the introduction of new players. Lobbyists are usually pushing for more regulation, not the opposite.

It's not about regulation or not regulation, it's about what kind of regulation makes sense for a free market.