> I actually had a conversation about this exact subject with a family member just last week. We live in a rural area and have awful service from Spectrum. He opposes plans for better cheaper muni internet because “The county government can only do better because they get to cheat - they don’t need to make a profit, but spectrum does.”

This argument is dumb because it has nothing to do with the government. A non-profit could take out a loan and build an ISP and not have to turn a profit.

The real argument in this nature is if the municipal ISP is being subsidized with tax money their competitors don't get. But you can solve that too: Either they pay for the network by issuing a bond and then have to pay it back from subscription fees, or if there is to be a subsidy then anybody operating an ISP gets the same one.

The actual problem here gets back to the original issue: The ISPs lobby the government to suppress any competitor. If the incumbent sucks and people hate them, why doesn't a non-profit, or any other for-profit business, enter the market and take their customers? Because the incumbent has lobbied for laws to prevent that, or will sue them under whatever pretext they can find to slow them down, try to bankrupt them and deter anyone else from making the attempt.

It's harder to do that to a municipal network because the government workers operating the network will have insider knowledge of how to deal with their own bureaucracy and have the ear of the government officials who approved the network to get any artificial roadblocks cleared away. But the real problem is that none of those impediments should be there to begin with.

> The government should build and maintain the physical infrastructure like fiber and cell towers, and private industry should be able to access this infra at cost + a small fixed markup and provide all other needed equipment and services on top of that infra.

You can do even better than that. Have the government install cable trenches along all the roads, then provide cheap access to anyone who wants to install fiber in them. That reduces the build-out cost dramatically and then you get competition without anybody being able to make any claim of unfairness because access to install cable is available to every individual member of the public. It should be cheap and easy enough that if you want to run fiber from your house to your buddy's on the other side of town, your primary cost should be the two miles of fiber optic cable.