> Usually the government selling something off is not cited as an example of government intervention. Most lazzei-faire types believe that is exactly what government should do - sell off the property to put it in the hands of the free market.

When a government sells intangible information waveforms, I'd consider it intervention. Radio spectrum is not a finite resource. You generate radio waves with devices by producing electromagnetic radiation. The "sale" of spectrum implies that the government owns what is on the exact same scale as visible light, which is completely insane. But it is the world we live in.

> Most people in my state get their internet via cable wires laid in the past few decades.

I live on the East Coast, my experience is probably different. Do note that cable is much more modern than phone lines - what AT&T had laid a century ago, most cable is indeed decades old. My area was seeded with cable lines in the 60s, it was early at that too.

> Local governments are much closer to small market players than they are to the leviathan state. There are thousands of towns and cities, but usually only a couple cable companies in any area. The exclusivity contracts are usually given out of position of weak bargaining power.

I talk about this in another topic I made in this thread, and it mentions how economic systems larger than a political system can push around the politics to their own gains. The way cable companies extort local government is a prime example.

> And here is the problem that has nothing to do with government - broadband wired internet is a natural monopoly. There are extreme capital expenses and the company that builds the first network has a huge advantage, it is usually not profitable for a second business to enter the market.

Infrastructure is a natural monopoly. There are dramatic diminishing returns on laying a second redundant set of the same thing than using one thing. I personally think fiber / cable / phone wire should be publicly owned and maintained, and ISPs provide gateways to the Internet via the routing servers and DNS caches to their clients, but you can contract with anyone to provide you the connection to the backbone.

Roads separate man from animal, in that man will slave to lay roads that benefit others, but not lose competitive reproductive advantages as a result. Any other animal that would forge their environment to the benefit of the many of their species would die off from having less energy to spend breeding. As a species, we have a unique ability to build foundations of road, power, and network that enable magnitudes of productivity gains for little cost - if we collectively agree to pay and support it. It isn't something I feel works well in a private competitive market, but I am pretty libertarian. So the solution to me is not to try to create artificial incentives to waste resources laying redundant cable, but that the cable should never be private in the first place. It is laid under public roads, run over private property, and should be a public good. It even was, for a brief time, until most local governments sold them to greedy business. I don't know how to solve the extortion problem, unless it is mandated at a higher level that the smaller governments can't sell off public infrastructure like that.

> Keep in mind that AT&T pretty much built its monopoly on its own. The government had the choice between breaking it up, and converting it to a regulated monopoly, and chose the latter. This may have been the wrong choice, but the country was probably better off for having at least some government intervention, and not allowing the monopoly to be completely unregulated and dedicated solely towards shareholder profits.

The early years of AT&T were a mix of government incentive and business practice. They spread so fast because everyone wanted phones, and they got subsidized to provide to everyone. It is another situation I think the correct solution would have been to go the way of roads (or maybe power lines) - public infrastructure supporting private, competitive end points. The phone lines should create a market for competition, as a foundational infrastructure an industry can be built on.