Outside of major urban areas, there is often no bullying required. It was not economical 20+ years ago for there to be more than one physical cable or telephone provider in an area. Moving away from dial-up and DSL (which sit on top of phone lines which anyone can buy access to) toward cable (and fiber in the past decade) has put the power on the cable companies who physically own and maintain the lines. Since, in contrast to phones, cable has not typically sold access other than direct-to-customer, they maintain that same model. They don't sell access for someone who buys a fast fiber connection to then connect to the cable network and then their cable customers "dial into" that person's box. Instead, you only get service through the cable company itself.

Because cable requires a massive financial outlay, we end up with regional monopolies unless cable companies are forced to open up their physical platform to others. Which is rare.

" It was not economical 20+ years ago for there to be more than one physical cable or telephone provider in an area. "

It was(is) more than that. Those companies were granted a franchise/local monopoly on providing the service. By law, nobody could compete with them, whether it was economically possible or not.

> By law, nobody could compete with them, whether it was economically possible or not.

Why not just fix that law now though. OP is stating that it is a profitable business. If they fix that law wouldn't there be new entrants, fixing original problem.

Acquisitions mostly. They've gotten into trouble with the state over their acquisition of TWC when they failed to uphold the conditions of the merger which required them to improve and expand service.

I heard it costs a lot of money to do these builds, for low return. You might even call it a natural monopoly, if you believe in such things like basic economics.

how does that contrast that with what GP said

> The service will be fully subscriber-funded and end up making the town money in several years.

seems like an a business lots of private operators would be interested in building.

Not a lot of private operators may be interested in a business that (is projected) to break even in say seven years.

Not sure what OP meant by "several years" but avg business like restaurents/bars take "several years" to break even but OP is saying its actually going to turn profits. 7 years isn't a long time at all to become profitable.