I don't think you can really argue that there is "public good" in building essential infrastructure wastefully and inefficiently. Ghosts towns and abandoned towns have always been a thing, since the dawn of civilization. They're abandoned usually precisely because it doesn't make sense to invest in infrastructure there - a railroad, a post office, a port, an electric plant. This isn't new. It's okay if cities die. The people that lived there aren't dying too. They're moving elsewhere, where they have better access to infrastructure and services. There's nothing wrong with that. And we shouldn't be wasting money to prevent it.

We’re not talking about economically inefficient ghost towns. We’re talking about large telco not being interested in building out fiber because the _profit_ wouldn’t make a blip on their spreadsheets and thus wouldn't drive the type of growth their shareholders are looking to see reflected in their company OKRs or whatever.

The deal with these protected monopolies, when the public grants them, is that the receiver is required to build out infrastructure to serve all the citizens who granted them the privilege of planting poles or digging trenches all over their public property (for comfy profit) in the first place. However those incentives are at conflict with a for profit charter as you understand.

We’ve done a woefully terrible job holding these companies accountable for building and investing in infrastructure even when it wouldn’t be convenient, which has been demonstrated time and again as people are raising in this thread. These telcos literally take billions in gov’t grants and sit on them saying “we tried it was too expensive, moar $$ plz”, which is complete and utter BS.

If we didn't have these arrangements then sure, let a for profit company do as it pleases. Let it negotiate the land rights with individual citizens. Let it raise the initial capital privately to fund buildouts. Etc. That’s just not how we handle common good utilities.

> The deal with these protected monopolies

A lot of the problems seems to be that Internet service doesn't need to be a full monopoly. Separate the organization that tears up the ground and from the one that provides data service.

BT (British telecom) tried that, first they split the network infrastructure biz into openreach, then they opened up the work for more contractors winning bids.

All the same "profit" arguments you're making against Telco's hold equally well against Starbucks or Home Depot or anyone else for that matter. Bad, risky investments are bad and risky no matter how much you try to subsidize them.

I agree that throwing tax money at corporations without clear deliverables is bad policy. It's also bad policy to waste taxpayer dollars building bridges to nowhere, which is precisely what broadband access in the middle of nowhere is.

Access to infrastructure makes places more desirable to live. It increases property values, which in turn encourage more development. I get it. I understand why local governments throw incentives to telcos to artificially make their cities more attractive and lucrative for business. It's not just telcos. We do it for sports stadiums, factories, movie productions. By and large, these policies end up being wealth transfers from the poor and middle class to wealthy people.

I get what you’re saying. I think you’re over simplifying. Building a bridge to a town of 10,000 is hardly nowhere. What you’re saying sounds like we should all just live in cheap concrete studio apartment complexes in one big city where we can hyper optimize human existence and squeeze maximal profit out of society… A bridge to a town of 10k can be quite profitable. Maybe not as much as a bridge to a town of 10 million, but my point is that because these companies are so big they shy away from projects with smaller rewards. Small locally owned mom and pop ISP would step in and fill the gap, but big telco has the monopoly on infra and won’t do the build out. Nobody is running negative and the line still doesn’t get deployed.

I think people should choose to risk and invest money and projects as they see fit. There are plenty of smaller and less densely populated towns with fiber broadband.

> A bridge to a town of 10k can be quite profitable

If it was, someone would do it. That's the beautiful thing about capitalism.

You don’t seem to be understanding the nuance that public infrastructure is not a free market.

We can opine about living in a libertarian paradise, but we don’t.