This argument between left and right often doesn't matter. A true public utility or a true commodity would both be great for the users of broadband. The problem is the corrupt center we have, where an open marketplace was ruined by corporate subsidies.
You don't need six lines connected to your house to deliver various services. It's a natural monopoly the same way having a single water connection is.
Because of that, the physical connection should be provided and managed by the government, or a designated government run corporation as a non-profit. The service carried on the hardware should be serviced by private companies with equal access to the hardware.
Except I am not sure it is destined to become a commodity in the near future because of the sky high capital expenditure required to roll out most forms of infrastructure in most places.
Then you make the last-mile infrastructure a public utility, but allow companies to compete by offering services over it. This sort of arrangement has worked well in other countries (generally with copper phone lines and DSL), and it really represents the best of both worlds. You take the part of being an ISP that's basically a "natural monopoly" (because of extremely high entrance costs and entrenchment) and operate it like a public good, while allowing the private sector innovate and compete over those lines.
The place it normally gets interesting with this approach is where exactly do you put the demark, especially in the FTTN world. Since you are going to most likely want the public utility to own the DSLAMs in areas with low/medium (eg, suburbs) population density, because the area covered by a cabinet is so small (because technologies like VDSL2+ have such a small optimal zone) and rack space in cabinets is normally at a high premium.
You are also going to most likely want the public utility to own the fibre backhaul from the cabinets to a central exchange. Because of port density constraints and the fact that the DSLAM is probably going to need to be managed by the public utility to stop access seekers doing silly things that affect other access seekers customers.
Now the public utility is also going to need some Ethernet switches to split this out to the various access seekers. Then you have issues of regional backhaul etc...
The issues are different again with the PON (Passive optical networks) family of technologies, but you can pretty much swap DSLAM for POLT, though the customer densities change the economics a bit.
With ISPs handling regional level aggregation and backhaul would probably be the optimal level in my mind at this point in time. But it is becoming interesting what the ISPs role really is anymore, once you take such a large amount of the infrastructure management off their hands. Since it would seem to be in between a traditional consumer ISP and an ISP that purely does transit.
Is it really that expensive to string cable? Fiber was laid like crazy all over the country in the late 90s, just not for the last mile. The "last mile" cost is probably all in dealing with the government to get permits and such. In which case government is the problem. They just need to make it easier to build.
