I suspect the reason the USA couldn't do that was because of strong land ownership rights. You couldn't "just put cables up" without people getting restraining

I suspect the reason the USA couldn't do that was because of strong land ownership rights. You couldn't "just put cables up" without people getting restraining orders to keep you off their property. I always figured there was more value in the easements (rights to access and run lines in property) than the actual physical plant on a lot of the legacy telecom companies. They had to do a lot of legal and commercial effort to get those for POTS phones, and trying to reproduce that effort for fibre seems near impossible.