Bandwidth consumption tends to grow, right? So eventually you fill the existing capacity. Somebody's then gotta build more, or the system becomes overloaded. I don't just want a usable signal, I want a fast signal, and one that gets faster over time.

One of the reasons we've got YouTube was that private fiberoptic companies (stupidly) overinvested in laying new fiber cables during the dot-com boom. When the crash came, the price of bandwidth fell through the floor. Then it became economical to build video-sharing services and AJAX webapps and other high-bandwidth apps.

In the U.S, our electrical grid is a regulated monopoly - not quite government owned, but it functions effectively like it is. A couple years ago we had a huge problem with blackouts and brownouts and a general lack of electrical power. All the spare capacity in the grid had been used up, and nobody had an incentive to build more. I worry that government-owned bandwidth will result in the same problem.