The internet should be a public utility

If the municipality lays the fiber and provides the internet service, the result may be poor. But that doesn't have to be the arrangement. The municipality can lay the fiber and allow multiple companies to offer internet service over that infrastructure.

In Chelan County, WA they've blended the best of public and private. The government took on the large upfront costs and laid municipal fiber down all over the place. Literally cabins in the woods are connected up to fiber optics. Then they somehow facilitated the capability for multiple providers to sell internet connectivity over that fiber. I'm not exactly sure how they did that -- maybe they laid multiple fiber strands, maybe they leased a variety of wavelengths, etc -- but the end result is that residents of Chelan County with fiber have multiple ISPs to choose from, the prices are very competitive and the service is good.

In Chelan County, LocalTel offers 1000Mbps down and 100Mbps up for $74.95 per month. No performance issues whatsoever with all the COVID-19 related traffic spikes and when you call LocalTel with a tech problem, a real human answers the phone -- it's wonderful.

> It is now abundantly clear which party values what

The problem is you only (effectively) have two of those. Many other democracies use proportional elections instead of first past the post, which generally results in a more diverse party landscape which in turn makes it easier to pick a party that aligns more closely with multiple of your personal preferences instead of one.

The party abstraction is incredibly lossy for people who don't slot all their preferences into the same bucket along a single axis. So having only two of those makes things even worse.

It also prevents the political landscape from shifting much since there are fewer players at the margins.

>Of course people don’t utilize their upload speed: it’s miserably slow!

The average internet user's bandwidth usage is always going to be asymmetrical, since the average internet user is downloading a lot more than they produce. One or two streaming movies on something like Netflix (15% of worldwide downstream usage by itself) will completely blow away a few video calls.

Try to enumerate the use cases for high upload rates, and you find that most of them simply won't apply to most users.

> “it’s already over we should just give up” attitude

I agree, thank you for pointing that out. I'm trying to fight this defeatist and cynical tendency in myself.

> The first step to reversing their influence is not viewing it as acceptable.

Right - as a form of local activism, I'll remember to voice my opinion on important matters, where the status quo is unacceptable.

The danger with government nationalizing telecommunications networks is that once it is done, innovation and quality go way down. We had nationalized telecommunications for over 70 years and customers could only have one brand of phone, and we're limited in the number of phones available in their houses. In addition, long distance calling was cost-prohibitive. The monopoly only started cracking when MCI introduced microwave based long distance calling.

Fortunately non-governmental is on the way for you. 4G/5G are decent options, many areas (rural and in major cities) have microwave based broadband, and it looks like Starlink will become a reality soon. Putting fiber lines in the ground is extremely expensive (especially in California) and frankly is not really needed by most of the population.

Are you just using a cell phone? In your situation or may make sense to buy a repeater or other dedicated hardware solutions.