> I do think that's how it should be. Municipality providers dark fiber from the CO(s) to every house.

We have a variant of that here. An indy company just laid fiber here but they don't provide service. Instead I have a choice of 8+ competing fiber companies.

Before fiber, I had 1 'choice' of ISP and paid $124/mo for 1Gb/40Mb w/ 40ms latency to the IX.

Now my choices include 1Gb/1Gb $49, 2Gb/2Gb $79, 10Gb/10Gb $199 w/ 4ms latency to the IX.