Apple isn't a utility so isn't a relevant comparison. Cake isn't a utility either, that's a foolish aphorism and is not a relevant comparison because we aren't

Apple isn't a utility so isn't a relevant comparison. Cake isn't a utility either, that's a foolish aphorism and is not a relevant comparison because we aren't talking about a limited resource. I can have both reasonable prices and universal service because now that Verizon is cutting people off from land-based phone lines, broadband is the country's communications utility, and it is entirely reasonable for a society to use its elected government to construct infrastructure and guarantee utility service to all of its citizens. It means both regulation and spending at the federal level: Verizon or Google or whoever picks up the cost of digging where it's profitable, taxes are spent make them whole where it isn't, but the regulation is they have to do whole counties at once. Yes, once you've gotten everyone to 1gbps or 10gbps or whatever "as good as it can reasonably get" is you can go ahead and deregulate for a while. Municipal governments have, for good reason, the right to manage their local right-of-way, because no one outside of town cares about that one blind turn on Middleofnowhere Street where someone's going to get killed one of these days. That's the only scale of government that can or will manage traffic safety or road conditions for local streets, and they have to have a say on how construction is done. The federal government will end up writing a huge novelty check to solve this or it won't happen. It'll be 10 times bigger than it needs to be because the corruption there is somehow just as bad as at the municipal level.