Yep. Though subsidising subscriptions is a pretty non transparent way of tendering for access. If you are in the business of creating lots of little monopolies

Yep. Though subsidising subscriptions is a pretty non transparent way of tendering for access. If you are in the business of creating lots of little monopolies to achieve universal access, wouldn't it be more transparent to just create one big monopoly? We tried this in oz. A gov. built backbone to be sold off (the naturally competitive part), with a gov. built and maintained 'fibre to the home' access (the natural monopoly part). Fox / News waged a months long campaign to have them booted out of office, in which they explicitly and repeatedly called the gov. nazi's, and outrageously lied about the associated costs for both the gov. and opposition broadband systems. Now we have a system which locks in contracts for the backbone, and rents copper infrastructure for the next 50 years for access. If you want fibre access, you have to pay for it to be hooked up at a prohibitively large cost. We know we can deliver access to everyone in oz through gov. for close to the price of delivering access to a privileged few through market monopolies. At a certain point, you have to realise this isn't about bad political choice, but a deliberate and sustained attempt to lock in privilege for the wealthy at the expense of everyone else. This is the real market distortion.