Utah Locals Are Getting Cheap 10 Gbps Fiber Thanks to Local Governments

Any reasonable observer wouldn’t compare the first 15 years of google to the next 15.

Also the examples(baring fitbit ) you cite were great product ideas but fairly small companies, it takes a very different kind of DNA to assimilate large organizations and still be somewhat functional, this is what a comcast acquisition would be .

Microsoft or even SAP have practiced this for years Google has in the last 10 years done of note only Fitbit and Mandiant you could maybe consider also Nest in outside edge of the window in 2014 , all small bets for google’s size

Apple is also similar, both companies believe they will do better doing everything in-house rather than acquire expertise in areas of interest (fiber, cars etc ) so far they have failed and now are content in giving money back to shareholders rather than find useful areas to invest .

AFAICT, the pole attachment regulation changes only happened in mid-January 2024. They're probably good changes, but

1) They happened just yesterday, speaking in "policy time".

2) If you don't think an absolute assload of time and money can be wasted with doomed-to-fail appeals and spurious orders for documentation and impact analysis and the like, you've spent all your life in a shockingly well-run city (or maybe a place with next-to-no municipal services and associated power grabs).

> It doesn’t matter in which cardinal direction you travel for 20 minutes...

Well, it does, actually. See below for commentary on your particular selection of SJ as your exemplar city.

> ...regulatory capture ain’t stopping anyone from starting their own ISP.

And yet for some weird reason, there are precious few non-telco/cableco ISPs in places like San Francisco that are doing something other than reselling rotting DSL, or running small microwave dishes on rooftops (that is, being a WISP).

San Jose may be remarkably well-managed (though, I expect WISPs make up the lion's share of your 20 ISP figure (and they're playing on easy mode in regards to permission-seeking)), but other places in the Bay Area are definitely not.

I've been living in SF for more than a decade, and I've watched Monkeybrains notice that building a city-wide fiber network was completely impractical and resorted to being a WISP. I've also watched Sonic's fiber installation program in the city stall for roughly a decade. While I'm glad that starting in mid 2019 [0] they've been able to string and light up fiber to not just small sections of the most western portions of the city but a significant fraction of the city, much of Sebastapol got lit up quite a while back. You'd expect a big city with a high density of customers would get lit up before a fairly small, sparse town if it was just a cost/benefit analysis doing the location selection.

Whatever you want to call it, the political and regulatory situation on the ground is obviously getting in the way of folks providing civilized-speed data transit services to potential customers in many major cities. You don't want to call it "regulatory capture"? Okay, sure. The on-the-ground political resistance and obstructionism is still rooted in the same sort of backroom dealing and under-the-table kickbacks, so you're just using a different phrase for the same behavior.

[0] Notice that this substantially predates the pole attachment rule changes that you've brought up.

The costs are so high that a reasonable person would never expect that, not without government subsidies. Like what's happening in the small towns.

Nothing is stopping you from starting an ISP-- except the fact that you'll go broke because most people are happy with Comcast. Sorry if I didn't make that assertion clear enough in my original comment.

That's why Google Fiber pitted cities against each other in mortal combat to see who could get the most people to sign loyalty pledges promising to subscribe and they turned on the electrified subsidy extraction machine to "high" before making a deployment decision.

> The on-the-ground political resistance and obstructionism is still rooted in the same sort of backroom dealing and under-the-table kickbacks

This is not true. Literally and actually you can start an ISP and run 100-gig fiber to every single block in San Francisco and no government or cabal in a smoke-filled room can stop you. Only your creditors can.