We don't need "innovation", we need a reliable utility.

Here in the US my water and sewer are handled by the city. It's pretty cheap and effective. I don't need more "innovation" in my water delivery.

My electricity is delivered by a regulated monopoly provider that answers to a Public Utility Commission and has a strictly regulated profit margin; it's purchased from one of a hundred retail providers. The supposed benefits of competition haven't materialized - we're paying the same for electricity now as we did when all electricity was a single regulated monopoly on an inflation-adjusted basis, only now no private investor will pony up for capital investment projects so we keep building cheap crappy power plants. Otherwise it's the same as before and it seems to function fairly well.

Either of these would be a huge improvement and exactly what the government is best at - handling public infrastructure that is ill-suited to competition or forms a natural monopoly.

In fact I'm suffering from Verizon's "innovation" right now thanks to their refusal to upgrade peering links. They're "innovating" ways to choke traffic to seek rent/extract money on my private transactions with Netflix, Crunchyroll, and others, despite the fact that I am already paying them for use of their network (and they used my private property to lay lines to the rest of the neighborhood - something for which I am not compensated).

I do not have any choices; my neighborhood has congested capped cable from TW or Verizon's artificially congested FIOS. That's it.

Frankly when Ma Bell/ATT was broken up I firmly believe it was done in a way to serve ATT's long-interests by keeping the retail and lines in the same ILEC box. It let the (D) government appear to be "doing something", right up until the (R)s proceeded to never meet a merger they didn't like.

What we need to to break apart Verizon and ATT and turn the physical plant into a regulated delivery company (DeliveryCo) charged with running fiber to the 90% of reasonably-reachable homes in the USA. That physical infrastructure should serve us for at least 100 years - we know how to send 10Gbps/100Gbps and more down the line and the expensive part is digging up yards/streets; the boxes on either end are a pittance by comparison. I suspect it would actually serve us for 1000 years or more but it's The Future so who knows.

Let anyone who wants to start an ISP do so; DeliveryCo just drops the ISP fiber/ethernet cables at whatever datacenter you like in your city and they're responsible for backhaul/transit, billing, customer service, packages, etc. Let DeliveryCo be effectively transparent with VLANs or IP/IP encapsulation so as far as my router and my ISP's router are concerned DeliveryCo doesn't exist.

People can claim it doesn't work, but the regulators seem perfectly capable of demanding 60hz+/-@120V AC be reliably delivered to every home with guaranteed response/repair times (except in cases of emergencies). When my underground cable gave out and started arcing with the dirt they answered the phone and sent a truck within 2 hours and it was repaired within 5. If DeliveryCo's regulator said they had to deliver 1Gbps links I don't see why it would differ.