Mesh networks aren't good for paid prioritization, bandwidth overage charges, arbitrary disconnection on copyright claims, paid peering, or location/origin-based censorship, all of which the current model supports very well.
Strongly crosslinked local communities are much harder to centrally govern. The entire US society is built around hub and spoke media.
But isn't the spectrum owned by the government? There is no compelling profit motive for government-provided services. The sale vs granting to the public likely had to do with the revolving door between interest groups and government.
Europe is targeting 500 MHz towards the end of this year.
CSMA/CA basically says: hear a few milliseconds if someone else is sending something and if not send yourself - this is a problem with noise and lot's of networks. LTE assigns timeslots and can omit the problems - there are better solutions now than CSMA/CA like OFDMA¹
https://www.networkworld.com/article/3315056/why-is-ofdma-a-...
The big fuckup of almost every regulatory body around the world was to not unlicence the analogue tv-whitespace in the 600-800MHz band.
At this frequency it's possible to build reliable local mesh networks. 802.11 is horrible inefficient through - why not mandating some open new standard with better usage of the bandwidth? It would still be a big win for a lot of communities.
But LTE happened and there was a lot of money to be made to sell the spectrum to big corps...