My second point was to point out that there are real reasons why the assumptions made about what broadband "costs" aren't really relevant to what you "pay" for it.
Without putting too fine a point on it, CAPEX on equipment/fiber tend to be dwarfed by the OPEX of leasing and labor costs associated with running a telecomm business for profit. Somewhat distended depreciation schedules mandated by GAAP compound the problem of removing obsolete assets from production networks and replacing them with newer equipment.
BTW, pricing for "Internet" has been "metered" almost from the beginning of commercial availability. UUNET did 95th percentile pricing for almost all of its dedicated access customers because that was the best way to tie consumption patterns to bandwidth availability.
If bandwidth seems expensive now, it's only because you've been paying for it for a very, very short time.
So does the extended depreciation force equipment owners to pay the taxes they would've written off for the extra years if they just disconnect the equipment and let it sit in a closet?
Careful. I used to work for a municipal fiber company and they are FAR from being the best group to build the kind of Infrastructure we need. Don't even get me started on the problem of politicizing the communications infrastructure of a city.
The only path forward is for us to get some real competition between the cablecos and the telcos.
"Everything is amazing, and nobody is happy." --Louis C.K.
Whenever this point is raised, I always argue that human progress depends on the amazing becoming commonplace, luxuries becoming essentials, etc. If we were always walking around being bewildered by everything, we'd have no reason to improve.