We’re not talking about economically inefficient ghost towns

We’re not talking about economically inefficient ghost towns. We’re talking about large telco not being interested in building out fiber because the _profit_ wouldn’t make a blip on their spreadsheets and thus wouldn't drive the type of growth their shareholders are looking to see reflected in their company OKRs or whatever. The deal with these protected monopolies, when the public grants them, is that the receiver is required to build out infrastructure to serve all the citizens who granted them the privilege of planting poles or digging trenches all over their public property (for comfy profit) in the first place. However those incentives are at conflict with a for profit charter as you understand. We’ve done a woefully terrible job holding these companies accountable for building and investing in infrastructure even when it wouldn’t be convenient, which has been demonstrated time and again as people are raising in this thread. These telcos literally take billions in gov’t grants and sit on them saying “we tried it was too expensive, moar $$ plz”, which is complete and utter BS. …