[zanny]

You should have both public and private options.

If you have exclusive state ownership of wired infrastructure like that, consumers have no state-agonistic means to correct if the state themselves starts breaking net neutrality or just simply do not maintain the network to a standard the consumers of it want.

If you were operating in a society where democracy worked flawlessly, it might work, but thats theoretical. We need to acknowledge the realities of the states we are talking about controlling our network infrastructure here, especially in the US. Since you make the comparison to road networks... mine is incredibly bad. And not just in condition or wear, but in scaling to meet needs. I live in central PA where a lot of businesses have migrated shipping and processing facilities, but there is extremely little budget to expand highways to compensate for heavily increased truck traffic. Now its just hell, and if I ever needed to work a commuter job I would instantly move because the traffic is so bad.

I'm not saying private roads could fix that - if residents didn't want to sell land to build roads, the private company would be screwed without recourse - but there should be huge market pressure around my area for highway expansion that is not being met because of dysfunctional bureaucracy in the state government due to many causes. Can you imagine those people having to build and manage a fiber network, and expand it as technology improves, for the next fifty years?