Dunno who is downvoting you, this is a sound debate. You are not trolling and it is abuse of the downvote button.

> I feel that opinions of issues are heavily influenced by the actors involved.

It is not so much individual commercial actors than ISP's in general having power. If they were being exploited through regulatory abuse, then they would be in a defensible position. But none of the policy surrounding them harms them significantly more than it helps, in that most of their networks were built on taxpayer dollars and that is a key reason why nobody can compete with them without state funding of infrastructure.

> from advertising to the endless variety of consumer goods available to people in the US

I agree wholeheartedly advertising is one of the worst industries around, because it creates terrible returns on investment (the real productivity gain of advertising is more informing consumers about goods and services than using psychological manipulation to get people to spend money a certain way).

But non-structural goods and services (ie, bread, or housing) has per unit per person utility. Common infrastructure like roads does not behave in the same "here are X units of good and Y units of buyer, and the market will adjust to make sure those numbers stay close to each other regardless of the number of competitors". With networking, power lines, roads, sewage systems, transit systems, etc - they all have the upfront opportunity costs, say the factory, but their marginal costs are nothing compared to them. Additionally, underutilized consumerate goods can just be shelved until sold. With bandwidth and power, unused power gets rerouted to inefficient storage mechanisms or just burns up on the wire. Unused electrical potential on the lines is just overbuilding without need, because maybe your wattage requirements in a region do not match the wires used (though this is rarely a thing, it is more often under-estimated). But there are no units to sell, and lost potential in the now is gone forever. If you build a highway that nobody drives on the investment was wasted, in the same way building a toy factory that never sells a toy is a waste, but for the highway the marginal cost of a driver on it (basically just wear on the road surface) is pennies, and the highway cost billions, whereas the toy factory cost millions and a million toys will sell for ten million.

With network wire the same thing applies. Underutilization means wasted potential, where the wire and infrastructure around it was incredibly expensive but the per-unit costs of electricity transporting packets over it is negligible. This means unlike unsold toys, any second the wire is underutilized is wasted productivity and potential.

The factory owner does care if hes manufacturing at capacity, but the market is much more fluid for toys and per-unit volume goods than it is for infrastructure.

> And I think that a light regulatory environment would best help foster this technology and encourage new entrants.

There are a lot of ways a regulation free market could solve our current networking mess. The biggest one would be that without "ownership" of wireless spectrum, you would have many more channels to broadcast on with radio technology, and could have radios that slide along much greater spectrum bands to find a compromise between bandwidth (high frequency) and range (penetration, mostly, at lower frequencies). You can balance usage more appropriately, and most everything from the 1mhz to 100ghz band is usable to some degree intelecommunications - the lower end is extremely low bandwidth, and the higher end has extremely short range, but in between you have a lot of potential value that is completely absent from the market as it is dedicated to private companies or one telecom provider.

In such a market it would not be about last mile probably, because the wireless technology would be so good. It makes a lot more sense to have one router with 100gbit bandwidth for a suburb than gigabit ethernet to a hundred homes, because you have the same underutilization problem on a per-consumer basis, and that last mile cable was the most expensive.

Besides that, in a regulation free environment, you could use wifi points to bridge property the owners would not let you lay wire on, or you could have communities agree to lay wire themselves.

And of course mesh networks, but there is still no solution for a macroscopic mesh network encompassing millions of nodes - you eventually have to gate them and have centralized routing between subnets because of the algorithmic complexity of each added node in a mesh like that.

And you can honestly do that today. You just need to wire between all your neighbors, and if they wire between all their neighbors, and you set up a subnet of your own with proper traffic monitoring, you would have a mesh net running under one backbone connection. But you still need that backbone, and you need to connect to it somehow.