>
My point is, I don't see how allowing these "exclusive" coverage monopolies does anything but harm the consumer. I imagine a community based provider like the one in the article would be met with a host of legal challenges here.I'm not sure I understand what you mean here. I think the confusion is over exactly what exclusivity AT&T holds? (I don't intend this as a lecture since you may well know all of this, I just want to include the full picture.)
In theory, exclusivity is a tradeoff to make regulated markets work. Given a market where they'll be legally required to accept loss-making projects like running service 2 miles for 3 customers, AT&T is persuaded to join by the offer of legally-guaranteed exclusivity. Without that, someone would come and undercut their price in town while refusing high marginal cost customers service altogether. So the idea is that you get access to wiring, in return for AT&T charging higher prices to population-center customers than a competitor might.
This works pretty well for some markets. The USPS is required to offer service everywhere, inflicting much higher operating costs than e.g. FedEx, but it gets a partial monopoly via government mail. ILECs did a decent job of getting everyone telephony access, despite later monopoly issues. And regulated utilities (water, gas, sometimes electrical) provide access consistently without extreme pricing abuses.
But the mess of internet is that unless the Keys have something strange in place, AT&T is an exclusive telephony exchange there. So they're obligated to get you telephone service, but don't actually have to sell you internet - they just do it when the telephony rules make adding internet affordable. Instead, AT&T has a non-regulated coverage monopoly on internet access. Their telephony monopoly gives them a reason to run wires of some kind to every house, at which point providing internet access is fairly cheap. And while competitors can access their poles, the combination of delays and cabling costs means it's rarely cost-effective to do so. Verizon, Frontier, CenturyLink, and Windstream are all inheritors of telephony monopolies, too. The only major broadband providers who aren't started life as cable companies (e.g. Comcast, CableOne, Altice), which weren't regulated monopolies, but still developed natural-monopoly ownership over large areas, and still create an added reason to run cabling.
(Of course, that's enough to create a few large natural monopolies, but it doesn't explain just how crappy things are. ILEC phone carriers should compete with cable ISPs, but outside of Fios intruding on Comcast that's been rare. And ISP pricing/quality is so terrible that in some regions it should still be profitable to eat the fixed costs and compete. As far as I know, that's a story of informal cartel pricing, "make ready" wiring issues, and anti-competitive practices like paying landlords for monopolies. Plus pocketing a small fortune in government funds for network improvements that never came to pass.)