Internet access isn't particularly expensive in the US.
Healthcare, education, and housing are expensive in the US for the same primary reason: political interventions that simultaneously subsidize demand and restrict supply.
The problem in the US is less of a geography problem and more of a regulatory one. Many towns and cities in the US gave the cable companies local monopolies back in the 50s and 60s. There are technical reasons why this worked ok (not well but perhaps better than the alternatives) for television, but now that the same rules have stretched to apply to delivery of internet access they no longer have any technical basis. So at this point they’re just a barrier to competition and exist only to raise prices.
The good news is that modern fiber systems blow cable internet out of the water. It is far cheaper to supply symmetric gigabit internet to every customer over fiber than over cable. Fiber just has more bandwidth to go around. And because it’s a different technology it is not subject to the same local monopolies that cable is encumbered with. This means that the free market is correcting the problem and has been for a decade. In many parts of the country it is now possible to get internet that is faster and cheaper than what is available in the even the best built parts of Europe. The main obstacle to that build–out is probably local permitting. Many large cities require new permits, with public comment periods for each and every one of them, for every single block that an ISP lays fiber for. Cities like San Francisco have imposed a glacial pace on their ISPs.
> And because it’s a different technology it is not subject to the same local monopolies that cable is encumbered with.
Exclusive francise agreements between municipalities and cable operators have been outlawed since 1992. But it's generally uneconomic to overbuild a new network with the potential to touch every home unless a large portion will subscribe.
Fiber internet is typically much better than cable internet, but cable internet is good enough for most people, so they're unlikely to switch unless it's significantly cheaper, which it often isn't -- especially since local incumbents tend to lower prices or rollout better service when a new entrant is entering the market (or announces they will ... Google Fiber city selection announcements drove lots of competing rollouts even though Google didn't install anything in those cities).
Regulation requiring wholesale access / line sharing / or strict separation of first mile and service infrastructure would allow for competition in service and routing, without having to build a 3rd last mile network. Congress did this in 1996, but the FCC walked it back for cable, the courts said if it doesn't apply to cable, it doesn't apply to telephone, and the FCC said internet over power lines exists and provides competition despite the lack of providers. Congress never came back to make clear that it wanted line sharing, so it disappeared from the mainstream.
I have municipal fiber where the municipality handles last mile only and I have a choice of IP service providers. But installation was very expensive and monthly service is also expensive relative to the ILEC and the cable company, although the cable company service on my street ends before it reaches me.
The cable and telephone companies have a major cost advantage that they can rebuild their networks with a good expectation of customer uptake; and they're allowed to manage the finances of build out however they see fit. The muni fiber (in my state anyway) has to bill customers for the costs of install and even if it could self-finance a build out to service all homes, wouldn't see a lot of uptake because most people find their current service to be good enough.
The federal government subsidized a planned, massive fiber build-out almost 3 decades ago. The telcos pocketed the money and then refused to complete the build-out, complaining that the last mile was too expensive. Municipalities pull teeth and the telcos have slowly rolled out to-home fiber piecemeal in the intervening years, as the local capacity to handle their extortionate rates appears. Alternatively, they will lay cable to your unconnected house/neighborhood for payments in the six- and seven-figure range.
Where we are is very much not a function of the free market.
Oh, I agree. There are huge distortions that have delayed the roll out of fiber internet by decades. But money talks, and ISPs are now building huge fiber networks in some parts of the country in spite of the best efforts of our government. I subscribe to Ziply Fiber (<https://ziplyfiber.com/internet>) which is building a large network in the Pacific Northwest that provides superb service to millions. They’re not perfect, but they’ll provide up to 50Gbps (symmetric) service to residential customers across four states. Compared to Comcast/Xfinity, which tops out at 2Gbps × 300Mbs, Ziply is amazing. That’s the free market fixing the problem in spite of the distortions introduced by local monopolies.
And that competition is definitely a good thing. Xfinity’s offering was far worse before they had competition because there was no incentive to offer anything better. They’ve even introduced a new idea to the market in order to win people back away from fiber: guaranteed fixed prices for five years. No surprises when promotional rates expire, no price increases, no shenanigans at all for five whole years. That alone is a breath of fresh air compared to their own business practices of just a year or two ago. Ziply had to respond by lowering their prices and ending promotional rates because they were losing customers. You know the old saying: as iron sharpens iron, so too does man sharpen man.
It would be better, of course, if the government were not mismanaging things. Switzerland’s solution is the better way to go than what we have today. Their government paid to build a nation–wide fiber network, and any ISP can service any customer on that network. That allows ISPs to compete on price and features without worrying about having to build their own competing and overlapping network. This is already how electric service works in many states, so it’s not even like we can’t make it work.
It's not the government, and I'm calling bullshit on your narrative because there's no mention of municipal fiber, and the industry's successful lobbying to make it illegal in most of the country. THAT would have been REAL competition.
>Their government paid to build a nation–wide fiber network
So did we. The last step is nationalizing that network and finishing the build-out in-house.
Municipal fiber exists in some places, but not most. It’s actually fairly common up here in the Pacific Northwest. Dozens of towns dotted around the map have their own municipal fiber networks, but Ziply serves more customers than all of them combined. Thus I say that the free market is fixing the problem that the government created. Another good example is Starlink. They provide service to millions in very rural areas that are out of reach of other ISPs.
When we paid for national broadband access here in the US, it was not for fiber to the home. It was for DSL. Worse, the FCC measured coverage not by service address as it does today, but by census district. The phone companies merely had to assert that they could provide service to an address in the district and the FCC would count the whole district as covered. The districts aren’t very big, so in dense areas that was not a bad estimation. In less dense areas it was just a giant loophole. They could provide service to one house on the edge of the district and not bother with the hundreds of homes miles away out in the countryside. Officially we got exactly what we paid for.
As you say we could still nationalize these fiber networks and stitch them together into a real national network. Of course they don’t all use exactly the same technology, and it would be a huge political fight, but in principle I could see a government agency gradually buying networks from the ISPs and integrating them. Of course you know that if Trump proposes it then the Democrats will immediately oppose it on the general principle that Trump proposed it.
The reason municipal fiber doesn't serve more customers is, again, because states were lobbied by telcos to make it illegal. Likewise, the loopholes that allowed the intended broadband buildout to be stymied. The problem is ultimately one of hobbled regulation allowing corporations to move and abuse freely. That makes the problem the free market.
Regulation is not the free market. Of course companies are going to lobby for more regulations if they think that they can get away with it. It only works because the legislators are idiots who think that free markets _must_ be regulated. It is easy to hoodwink them into passing idiotic regulations. They boast about the accomplishment in their press releases as if they had saved the country.
Municipal fiber is not outlawed here in Oregon, so there are quite a few municipal networks here. But they are not expanding as fast as even a single ISP like Ziply Fiber. None of them have expanded beyond their small town to serve unincorporated areas near by. All of them are funded more by taxes than by subscribers.
> The government has created a situation with the student loans thing where basically anyone can borrow 500k to get an obviously useless degree.
The point applies even to the useful degrees, and more broadly to the universities irrespective of any particular degree program. Student loans and scholarships make demand almost completely inelastic -- totally insensitive to price increases. Universities compete to attract the best students, and a major mechanism for doing that is to invest in non-academic amenities, such that tuition prices are funding much more than literal tuition. Combine these two factors together, and you have a feedback loop of continuous price inflation.
Similar factors are at work in the healthcare and housing sectors, with the most important element being that external subsidies eliminate price elasticity on the demand side of the equation, and completely obliterate the dynamics that ensure downward price pressure in normal markets.
Healthcare, education, and housing are expensive in the US for the same primary reason: political interventions that simultaneously subsidize demand and restrict supply.