Actually, I really wonder why it doesn't work that way in the US. I worked for an ISP company that grew from a tiny startup, connecting just a few buildings, t

Actually, I really wonder why it doesn't work that way in the US. I worked for an ISP company that grew from a tiny startup, connecting just a few buildings, to a successful ISP that covered a significant part (almost all, I believe) of small (200K) city in Russia. I haven't really interacted much with our network builders department (worked on software, and left the company some years ago, moving to another city), but IIRC in overall it worked like this - people found our offers interesting and signed up to get their buildings/apartments connected. We chose new addresses we were able to physically reach, got the approval from the building owners and the city, and laid down the wires, extending the network's frontiers. We laid our own fiber (or, sometimes, copper) and used wireless bridges whenever we weren't able to reach otherwise. We had also leased fiber from other companies (there are companies here that have business just by providing underlying infrastructure but not offering the Internet connectivity). It's not like adding an extra fiber to an existing conduit is comparable to installing a new sewer line. In the end, having 4-5 actually different ISPs in a building - usually all with their own lines - was (still is) a norm where I had lived. Competing offerings drove prices down, and bad behavior (sans the state-mandated ones) were mostly non-existent. What's so different in the US, that even Google had failed?