[hippiehippo]

Eastern Europe, especially Bulgaria and Romania, would beg to differ about the "free market fails if left alone". Between 2000 and 2010 it was basically a free-for-all for ISPs and each city had almost dozens of them running wires on poles, on apartment building facades, on... trees.

And today you can get a 1 Gbps connection (in reality it works at 900 mbps in Europe and at around 300 mbps across the Atlantic) for less than $20 per month.

How could you call the banning of new infrastructure (through an insane ammount of regulation) by local authorities in the USA as Free Market?

[ash]

Something like this happened in Russian cities too. Broadband is cheap, fast, lot's of competition, cables hanging between apartment buildings etc.

Recently there have been some troubling signs when (government) monopolies started to buy smaller private ISPs. Internet is still cheap and fast, but who knows what will happen…

[anon4]

>had

Bulgaria here. We still have them - smaller ISPs who don't run proper cabling, it's just the major ones don't run their cables through trees any longer. And I want to note - even when they did ran them through trees and a storm would cut the cables or fry the routers, replacements would be put up within an hour. The only downside to me, as a consumer, is that during a storm, a lightning bolt might hit a cable and fry my pc, but that's a very very low probability and I just run the cable through a surge protector.