This is easily disprovable. Broadband providers invest tens of billions a year in infrastructure. The fastest cable or wireless connection available to you is probably 10x faster than it was a decade ago. By comparison, your Intel laptop is maybe 3-4 times faster, maybe less. That cost gobs of money--building cell towers, pushing fiber deeper into the cable network, reducing users per HFC node by a factor of 10, etc. This is all incredibly labor intensive and expensive; it's not just a matter of downloading "DOCSIS 3.1" onto some head ends and calling it a day.

> Some have taken government subsidies and threw elaborate parties and went on luxury cruises while not building anything.

Note also that the "government subsidies" are anything but. The article you link to is talking about Universal Service Fund money, which is actually taken from ISPs and given to other ISPs. It doesn't come out of general tax dollars.

> leads to California's and the US's subpar system.

According to Akamai, U.S. broadband is among the fastest in the world, faster than all the large EU countries: https://www.akamai.com/fr/fr/multimedia/documents/state-of-t.... We're in the top 10, right after Denmark, and ahead of the U.K., France, Germany, Spain, Italy, etc. (the countries comprising 70% of the EU population).

> And it stays that way because hoards of people either apologize for it or just refuse to see what it is regardless of the evidence

Exactly the opposite is true. The actual evidence shows that the 1996 deregulation has been a monumental success in terms of amount of money invested and actual broadband speeds achieved. Proponents of heavy regulation have to deny the actual evidence (dollars spent, speeds achieved) because it suggests a shocking result: even deregulation that resulted in much less competition than anticipated is still better than the prior, heavily-regulated system. (I'm writing this as my awesome government-funded train system is stuck between Annapolis and D.C. for no apparent reason.)

What's holding us back from being even better (and which is why I have fiber but much of Silicon Valley does not) is state & local broadband regulation. Red tape that makes it hard to string up fiber (or forces you to bury it, at much higher cost), hard to create an "minimal viable ISP," etc. When I lived in Baltimore, for example, Verizon wanted to come in and compete with Comcast. The city literally wouldn't let them do it, and pleaded with Google to come build Fiber instead. Which Google wouldn't do, because, quite reasonably, Google only builds Fiber in places where cities are willing to waive requirements municipalities uniformly require for other providers: https://crosscut.com/2014/12/google-fiber-never-come-seattle....