The australian disease is the great big national thing. The only time this concept has ever worked for us is Medicare, and secretly thats actually managed on the state level with national funding.

>government to handle the infrastructure and then lease out access to whoever wants to offer services over the lines.

We had loosely:

1. Government telco ran copper everywhere, did a shit job of it, they are still replacing faulty gel joints.

2. Government sold said telco, with a monopoly on fixed line internet services.

3. Newly private telco did fuck all and basically existed for a while.

4. The government mandated that they permit ULL resale, basically renting access to their monopolised cabling

5. Australia had its greatest % increase in internet speed as lots of small players started dropping DSLAMS on their exchanges and exchanging peering.

6. That fizzled out, and we reached the limits of what could possibly be done with copper in the short term.

7. Instead of looking at what worked historically (ULL) they decided to build a brand new giant government telco with a fixed line monopoly (ripping it away from the last guys). Average punter has no long term memory and thinks that repeating the original sin with Fibre instead of copper has literally no downside.

8. Because this is a NEW NATIONAL thing, chumps, of which there are plenty, will defend it without any analysis deeper than "My fibre works fine"

9. One of our larger private carriers took the National Carrier to court arguing that the law was anticompetitive. They settled out of court and the law wasnt changed. However, the industry has continued in sort of a grey area where the national carrier hasnt formally complained about any of its competition but it could still do so and fines would be issued.

10. Several government MP's floated the idea, all at once, that the government should compulsorily acquire every other fixed line telco network in the country. 6 weeks later they stopped saying that. Its in policy limbo, largely because their justification was that the National telco was better somehow, but upon reflection they probably realised that the national telco was the only telco excluded from customer protections and things would be worse for customers overall if they lost their private alternatives.

But thats where their brain is at. Rather than the fines, they will probably just use the threat of fines at some stage to forcibly acquire other networks. Which will be a long, expensive, and overall shitty experience for customers. The public will clap and cheer when the evil private networks (many of which are far better in speed and quality than the national carrier) get absorbed.