In a free-market, rural availability won't improve.
In a free market, rural availability will be priced appropriately and then everyone can make a decision where they want to live without expecting a subsidy from people who made a different choice.
Cities are greener, and more economically efficient. I see no problem with making living in the city slightly cheaper, and living in the countryside slightly more expensive.
It is a civilizational norm that people settle along commerce routes, rivers, coasts, highways. Now, it's starting to make sense to adjust for the flow of information.
There is a strong argument against this, that has nothing to do with pricing. Telco networks are natural monopolies. The government has an in terst in not duplicating the asset base. They also have an interest in maximizing the value of that asset base. The latter is a function of network effects. The former precludes free-market competition from even being viable.
The networks becomes more valuable in a non-linear manner vis a vis coverage. The network is worth more to the government and to the users when it nears 100pc coverage. This is why rural telco is subsidized.
The cost of <not> having 100 pc coverage would be an externality borne by the state. And so the economic ROI of teh incremenatal coverage has nothing to do with free market economics at that stage. Optimizing the cost benefit is strictly a function of fiat decisionmaking.
The cost of <not> having 100 pc coverage would be an externality borne by the state.
How so? The cost would be primarily borne by people who choose to live in the sparsely populated areas. Often because they want to get away from others so it's not even really a cost.
When it comes to just mere connectivity (for emergency communication and the like), satellite coverage is more than enough and cheaper to provide in unpopulated regions. Plus, Motorola already sunk a ton of money (in Iridium). Now you want to do it again?
Also, a perspective where the government owns the network(?), and maximizes its value is pretty bizarre to begin with. Maybe it would make sense under some sort of hereditary monarchy. Otherwise, all the incentives are completely out of whack. The government will just go with whatever is beneficial to the backers of the coalition currently in power, like the fed and fcc already seem to be doing.
The telco and internet backbone are considered public-emergency infrastructure. The government would need to build a PSA system with 100 percent coverage, if they were unable to camandeer one already built. That opportunity cost is huge, and why as part of the operational licesnses of cable/telcos, there is language to provide for emergency services.
There is a market of sorts. If there is no fast internet in some village, the a private company has to evalute the cost benefits. They can achive a local monopoly but they can not make prices to high. Peole have lived there befor there was high speed internet and if your price is too high, they have not lost anything but yoi lost your investment.
So the telco has to evalute, what the investment cost and how many subscriptions they can sell. If they set it to high, not enought people will buy it. So the market is esentially against how high people value your product.
Also how is the cost cost covered by the state? It is not generally true that the internet is better with more people, specially people who dont value internet highly.
Also your argument can be made for anything, for example, if everybody loved product X then marginal cost of production goes down and that is bettwr for everybody. So would you want the state to enlarge the market for product X, just because it would be better for everybody?
Also its a question of cost, for example, i prefer if there are more people in the internet, however if you ask me how much im willing to pay for otber people getting internet then my answer is pretty much 0.
You are completly ignoring the cost aspect of the cost benefit calculation.
In a free market, rural availability will be priced appropriately and then everyone can make a decision where they want to live without expecting a subsidy from people who made a different choice.
Cities are greener, and more economically efficient. I see no problem with making living in the city slightly cheaper, and living in the countryside slightly more expensive.
It is a civilizational norm that people settle along commerce routes, rivers, coasts, highways. Now, it's starting to make sense to adjust for the flow of information.