Actually the US government spent quite a lot on the infrastructure. Around '97, I moved from Sweden to the US, after running an ISP there since '93. Since it was an obvious concern I checked and the US was pumping in slightly more per capita, while being ~40% more population dense. So no problem (I thought) - if anything speed and availability will rocket up faster here. However, back there the government kept control of the lines (not entirely unlike US telecom). Net neutrality was kind of a given - obviously the government can't (at least without massive legal changes) give preferential speed to some peoples information directly (i.e. blatant censorship - if you're a private enterprise you can limit stuff like that, not so much if you're the govt). Back home things rolled along swimmingly, the same crew I ran with back then are still online, some of them whining that they haven't pulled gigabit fiber into their areas and have to settle for 100 megabit symmetric. Even before the millennium 10 Mbit symmetric fiber was becoming pretty normal all the way into residences. No one really pulled copper wire for comm anymore really, if a new line went in, fiber. Need to redraw power lines? Throw in fiber. Water? Fiber. Just dug up a sewer line? Throw down some fiber, you never know..
Here? I can get 20 Mbit (5 down) in a fairly large town. Some cities have more, but I've seen none where 50 or 100 Mbit symmetric is considered the sort of "lowest tier" broadband (kind of like "at least it's not dialup"). For only 2-3x the price. Why? Because no one with the peoples actual interest kept the reins, they just handed shit over to the six majors and told them to get building. Why would they, when they're already competing against no one but themselves? Cuts into profit, stuff like that.. So you get to pay more in tax dollars for it, more for the service itself and it's way slower. The same seems to be true for korea (et al, the other fast nations), they're not spending more, they're just negotiating harder with those contracted to build it. Now, Sweden is talking about selling it off (since the whole place is shifting right). Predictably, prices are going up and speed increase is stagnating. Idiots, all of them. The free market rocks for optimizing low entry threshold fields and optimizing already existing solutions. It's horrible at things that are mostly infrastructure based, with high cost of entry and nearly all costs being in fixed infrastructure improvement chunks. Highways, telecom, power, water, etc all work the same - if you want to run them free market style, prepare to suffer until you decide to simply join forces and run it jointly without a profit goal bidding it out in small enough chunks to make actual competition possible.