alt Hacker NewsBut what about large governments? Japan has amazing internet service, and NTT is mostly private (with the government retaining only 1/3 ownership).
I would trust my county to deliver my fiber internet. All my government services work great. I literally marvel every time I visit our municipal dump, which is cleaner and mode efficient than my home country of Bangladesh. But I wouldn’t trust most of the other counties I’ve lived in before to do it (Baltimore, Wilmington DE, Chicago, etc.).
Given that the argument about municipal fiber centers around a dynamic of large corpos preventing competition from small municipalities (by lobbying for state level prohibitions, etc) that seems besides the point. If a city can't get its own network off the ground, then the whole thing becomes a noop (apart from having wasted the money, which they would have done on something else regardless).
But when cities have the population density to support multiple competing Internet providers with decent physical layers and non-extractionary terms, then there generally doesn't seem to be much of a call for the city to provide its own services in the first place.
Furthermore cities that are incompetent about deploying infrastructure are going to be similarly incompetent at facilitating the permit process for private infrastructure - giving governmentesque incumbent providers a hold over a captive market regardless. So while this is a general problem that deserve its own exploration, it wouldn't seem to have much bearing on Internet access specifically. The real concern is municipalities that would be perfectly capable of providing Internet service (along with the rest of their municipal services), yet are being held back from even trying.
(Also I don't know what the Japan example demonstrates anything because 1. Japan and 2. that 1/3 ownership stake belies a much bigger controlling interest due to being the government)