> Given the type of government service they’re going to get—one run by New Yorkers, not Swedes or Japanese—are they wrong? Their frame of reference is the MTA (which runs subways that are late 15% of the time), the NYCHA, which runs some of the worst slums in the country, and NYC DOE which has a graduation rate worse than the subway’s on-time performance.

FWIW, the MTA is run by the state government, not the municipal one. That being said, as someone who has lived in New York the past 8 years (still don't quite consider myself a "New Yorker", but maybe I never will), I have no strong sense that the city government would make a particularly good internet service, but even a mediocre one would be _miles_ ahead of Spectrum. I have no other option in my apartment building, and we get random outages when there isn't even a storm or anything an average of maybe a few hours a month. Their website never shows an outage when it happens, but after I check the status when our internet is down, I'll get a text in around a half an hour saying "oops, there's an outage". The idea of being in one of the largest cities in the world but not being able to get reasonably consistent internet for literally any cost is mind boggling to me, and having such a terrible service have exclusive access to my market is a much larger failure of municipal regulation than merely having a subpar municipal internet service as an alternative.