Mechanism
The last mile doesn't care about your business case
So I spent a weekend in Toronto last month, and their internet just works. Gigabit symmetrical, $50, no asterisks. I mentioned this to someone on our ops team and they looked at me like I'd described a unicorn. We're in Portland. We get 300 down, 12 up, for $80, and I'm two blocks from the central business district.
The thing that gets me is that it's not actually a technology problem anymore. Fiber works the same in Ohio as it does in Netherlands. The difference is that we let cable companies own the last mile and then acted surprised when they had zero incentive to overbuild. Comcast isn't sitting around thinking "gee, I wish I could give customers on Oak Street gigabit service." They're thinking "why would I spend capex when they already pay us $80 a month and have no alternative?"
In countries that actually solved this, municipalities either laid fiber themselves or regulated the hell out of the incumbents and required open access. We went the opposite direction. We let the cable TV monopolies that were installed in the 1980s calcify into broadband monopolies. Then we looked at the resulting patchwork and called it a market. It's not a market when one player owns the physical infrastructure and there's no meaningful competition. It's a tax.
The FCC keeps announcing programs and timelines. Meanwhile people in Seattle get fiber while people in Beaverton (seven miles away) are stuck on DSL. I've seen post-mortems written for less egregious resource allocation problems.
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I'd push back on the "it's just regulation and incentives" framing, because I watched this play out differently in my last job. We were doing infrastructure work in a mid-sized city that actually got municipal fiber built—full open-access mandate, the whole thing. And yeah, competition showed up. But here's what surprised me: the incumbents didn't suddenly start competing on speed or price. They competed on bundling and service packaging in ways that actually made the market *worse* for a lot of people. Older folks who just wanted internet got pressured into triple-plays. Small businesses that relied on a single provider now had to manage relationships with three. The city's "problem solved" situation turned into a logistics nightmare.
The real issue might be that last-mile infrastructure is genuinely hard to compete on once it exists, regulation or not. Toronto works partly because they had the political will to ignore sunk costs and build new. But that's rare. Most places that tried to force open access ended up with the same incumbent still doing all the actual maintenance and customer service. You can mandate competition on a platform you don't own, but you can't mandate it away from being a natural monopoly in practice. The Portland-to-Beaverton gap you're seeing isn't just market failure—it's that fiber to seven miles of suburbs costs real money and there's no magic policy that makes the economics work if the density isn't there.
I think you're pointing at something real, but the "it's just regulatory failure" framing is missing the actual crux, which is uglier. The technology is indeed fungible—fiber is fiber. But the last-mile problem isn't really about technology or even regulation in isolation. It's about the fact that infrastructure with high capital costs and low marginal returns doesn't attract private investment at the scale needed, period. Regulation can force it, sure, but only if someone's actually willing to spend the money upfront.
Toronto and the Netherlands didn't solve this because they were smarter about markets. They solved it because public entities spent enormous capital with no expectation of ROI. That's not a regulatory insight—that's a decision to treat connectivity like water or roads. We *could* do that here. We've chosen not to. And honestly, the regulatory captures aren't really the obstacle; it's that we'd rather blame Comcast's incentives than admit we're not actually willing to fund public fiber the way we fund highways. That's a different kind of market failure—the political kind.