I love small government. But if certain infrastructure makes more sense at a municipal level ideology should go out the window. We don't have a lot of private roads because it just doesn't make sense, the normal competition driving efficiency model falls over because the most efficient solution involves only one road per route ( over simplifying here ). I think the same maybe true with the local loop of consumer level internet connections.

A big difference is that roads are (roughly) a government monopoly—reudcing competition while these municipalities are adding competition.

The idea is that in poorly functioning markets the government can step in with an alternative, especially one that is obligated to at least break even in order not to stifle innovation, to restore the market.

This really ought to be a bipartisan idea. I beleive the Roosevelt institute his written on this, let me find a link.

Many would say that these markets are poorly functioning due to government interference in first place, like these very laws, for instance.

Traditionally, such laissez-faire views would distinguish government constraining itself and government constraining the private sector, approving of the former and not the latter.

But I'm down to look at both the same way (especially when, as I wrote, government is constrained not to indefinitely run at a loss so as to play by more similar rules).

That said, I know of little historical evidence that market competitiveness restores itself in the absence of external meddling. The fact is in telecom we are coming off a history of official monopoly, competition, and then a near-reformation of the monopoly without the increased regulation to go with it. So it sure as hell looks as if we backed off the controls and market-based approaches failed.

Now it could be that post-deregulation and trust-busting, there was still too much regulation, but again I don't often see laissez-faire views claiming that government entry into the marketplace must be allowed. A middle ground that I'm more receptive to is that a never-interfered-with market will always self-correct, but past interference interference may have distorted the market into an otherwise-unreachable state where self-correction is not possible. In that case we should with heavy intrusion try to force the market into a good state, and then slowly easy off the controls carefully monitoring to see if such self-correction does occur.

Economic pontificating aside, with wired networks I think there is a legitimate public interest in fewer redundant wires (like roads), and too much incumbency advantage with the amount of infrastructure required, for me to put much faith in market-based approaches. Wireless networks on the other hand largely avoid those problems so I think that's a better area for them.

This is basically how govt works in the US. want it to change? Form a non-profit in these states, collect money, and donate it to campaigns to overturn these laws.