And even with a free market, there's areas where making up the investment would be difficult, because the amount of effort divided by the number of likely subscribers, still wouldn't pencil out for 20+ years. A lot of Americans live in suburbs that are just low density enough that updating the infra to get fiber anywhere near the house is expensive, and then you might have quite a bit of fiber specific to that one subscriber. The difference in how much infrastructure you need vs a city is substantial.