alt Hacker NewsTelephone and data is an interesting one. It's an area that on its face is a natural monopoly, but in much of the US we ended up with two telecom providers
Telephone was a monopoly because it doesn't make sense to have more than one company string a wire to every house and business. But, all that wire could carry until the 90s was a voice call
Likewise, in the 60s/70s/80s cable TV became a thing but it didn't make sense to have more than one TV wire to every house, because it already has all the TV you can get, and at the time all it could carry was video channels
In the 90s these networks converged: when everything is digital, a network carrying digital signals can carry any kind of data
So, in urbanized and suburban areas we largely have a competitive market in what would otherwise be a natural monopoly. The problem is, because it's competitive in like 80-90% of the country everyone's been relieved of their universal service obligations (which applied only to voice service anyway) so there's been little incentive to expand into more rural and underserved areas
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> it doesn't make sense to have more than one company string a wire to every house and business.
Not necessarily so. In cities it is quite normal to run 2-4 optic fibers to most buildings; my building in Brooklyn has 2 different fibers and a cable link. Equally, there are 2-3 national mobile providers which cover most of the entire US.
In the suburbia this breaks, or course.
I'm always bamboozled by the price of internet connection around the US and that there is a data limit one can upload or download. Perfect example of this milking while making service worse over time.
In Sweden there are many cities where the infrastructure (dark fiber to the premises) is publicly owned, but the public infrastructure owner offers no end-user service. Instead, internet service for end users is an open market where everyone uses the public infrastructure. It works really well and is really cheap for the consumers.