Agreed. But you are 27 years late to this argument at least in the US. In 1996, when the Internet was hot, telcom providers promised to spend tens of billions

Agreed. But you are 27 years late to this argument at least in the US. In 1996, when the Internet was hot, telcom providers promised to spend tens of billions building out fiber infra US-wide as long as Congress guaranteed them they owned the fiber and would not have to act as a public carrier as they had to do with their copper (phone, xDSL internet). My understanding is that was granted in the Telecommunications Act of 1996. I confess I am finding it hard to find the smoking gun making this so clear but it was moderately clear at the time. The legislation did require unbundling of the copper elements to competitive local exchange (telco) entities which then sprung up but slowly died under the onslaught of Baby Bell marketing and technical neglect. A personal anecdote illustrating the technical neglect: In the competitive DSL era pre-fiber, I once spent weeks trying to get my local CLEC to fix my intermittent DSL connection in my suburban dwelling and their hands were tied because they were in turn dependent on the local Bell company to actually service/debug last-mile issues and the local Bell company was not really incented to debug intermittent issues for others' customers promptly if they could keep their ticket-closing metrics up. They also didn't really want to invest anything more than absolutely necessary in the copper they had to share with others when they could spend their capital on new fiber. I was able to show them the packet and ping drops in service on my connections and even the DSL modem's outbound connection logs along with timestamps proving the intermittent nature of the issue but it took about a dozen calls and several in-person visits to get the copper fixed. I spent maybe... 20 hours trying to get it fixed and I cannot imagine any but the smallest fraction of people being both aware and persistent to overcome such obstacles. In subsequent years, the telcom providers made a point of disabling copper whenever installing fiber so once you were upgraded, you were fully locked in and could no longer competitively downgrade and shop for copper DSL once you went fiber. Quite a racket.