I completely agree with you. The last mile should be public, with anyone permitted to provide service to customers (similar to the old DSL/CLEC/ILEC model).

Or you could have public last miles with openaccess requirements providing competition on the parts that can see competition.

I will take that as a compliment! Thank you!

The reason that Americans view Internet access as a natural monopoly is because there is a monopoly--the city. ISPs have to negotiate rents from the city government. While it is possible for a city to offer fair-access terms they have largely discovered that they can demand rents much higher than you would expect by keeping the number of tenants small.

These rents comprise something like 5-10% of city revenue. And so everybody gets what they want:

* The city gets a free 7% budget bump, and doesn't care who pays for it as long as it's too complex to be an election issue

* ISPs get a monopoly, and don't care that they play the scapegoat because consumers have no other choices anyway

* Citizens get better government services at lower tax rates. Sure, they pay for it via a backdoor tax on internet access but nobody really notices that and they direct their anger at the ISP rather than the elected government

Really the only way to throw a wrench in this system is something like Google Fiber. Nobody wants to be the elected official that turned Google away, because that is actually a sound-bytey enough issue that could come up at re-election. And Google, as a company that doesn't really care about being a profitable ISP, will only move in to a city if it gets a pretty good deal on the rents.

> And while that infrastructure is indeed common and so in a sense a monopoly at that level, there are also multiple cable companies and mobile networks with completely independent infrastructure all the way down. There have even been a couple of impressive success stories where installing high speed broadband infrastructure was too expensive or risky in a certain geographic area for any of the big commercial providers to take it on but the local community devised their own solution, sometimes even finishing up with a better connection than what most of us get in big cities.

This is what I'm advocating for. A public last mile that any service provider can use.

What you describe is the definition of a natural monopoly. However, the monopoly comes from physical wires, not whatever flows over them. So, the infrastructure should be a public good (most infrastructure, really, not just wires, since it's more efficient and less wasteful to build a single network and keep it in excellent condition than to build multiple networks providing the same service at a lower quality), but whatever flows over it can be provided privately and competitively (also, each ISP would have to build it's own servers/routers, etc.)

I'd definitely argue that Police and Fire have natural monopolies. It's definitely more efficient for one agency to manage the entire police force for a city, rather than having multiple. Imagine having cops from 5 different services go out to one call, possibly mistaking the others for an armed civilian. You can see where that would lead, given how trigger happy some cops are already. Imagine 5 different fire trucks arriving at a scene. They wouldn't have enough space to do their job with all the others around them. Keeping track of the people at both of these scenes is also nearly impossible with several forces (and it's critical to know who's in the burning building or who's armed in a crime scene.)

Healthcare is a highly imperfect market, and that's what makes it subject to either huge amounts of regulation, or outright external management. Consumers are very ill informed. Ccosts are not displayed, treatments options are not well defined, and knowing all of the options and understand them requires more time and education than is reasonable for most cases.

Education is tricky, and honestly, I don't know any better than the next guy how to solve the issue. What's important to one parent may not be important to another. Second language? Art? Music? Sports? Recess? Lectures? History? Religion? Critical thinking? What outcomes are important? Good test scores? Writing?

Police have a natural monopoly because they're agents of the government, and the government by definition has a monopoly on violence.

Education doesn't, but police and fire definitely do: police because beat cops reduce crime for everyone, so they're a natural monopoly. Fire as well, since stopping houses burning down helps stop the entire neighborhood (especially when you have close-together row houses) burning down.

Healthcare is arguably a public good, at least as far as vaccinations and contagious diseases go, since herd immunity is a large way to fight them (especially for contagious diseases for which we have 80%-90% effective vaccines). Not so sure about other illnesses (like cancer) though. I'm personally for socialized medicine for other reasons (humanitarian), but I agree that the natural monopoly argument is not applicable there.

"Turns out that most of the time, we don't need hospitals the size of college campuses (incidentally another thing that is completely unaffordable)."

However people are not willing to accept the consequences of hospitals that can't surge in catastrophes. When an EF-5 tornado hit my city 3 years ago, it took out one of our two hospital complexes. Things got ... rather intense at the other (http://stormdoctor.blogspot.com/2011/06/first-response-mode-...) but it being big, and stocked with otherwise excess inventory of all sorts of things, kept the death toll at ~160 instead of a likely 1,000 or so.