Don't have time to respond to most of your post but I was just up in Chattanooga and there was free public fast wifi in lots of places I visited. I'm not suggesting that the internet is free in Chattanooga, that's different.
And yes, to echo BT, this should be regarded as a utility and I do not give one single fuck about big telecom companies having to spend money to enhance their infrastructure. Everyone knows how much it sucks to get locked into a one or two year contract with Comcast and how many weird sneaky charges you get that you may have to dispute, a publicly owned utility (which granted may not worked in every single town in the US) cannot fuck you in the ass over costs like a big telecom. I dropped comcast at my last place because they started doing repairs for several days and literally didn't tell me, even when I called customer support. They are a shitty evil organization that I would not trust to run a fucking lemonade stand correctly, at least with a public utility you can freaking hold public officials accountable, quit giving me this ~ * MARKETS * ~ crap
This isn't the US government doing it across the nation, it's going to be up to municipalities to do so in a publicly owned way hopefully. You cannot seriously suggest to me that in 2019 having shitty slow internet in a less than urban area (without paying out the ass) doesn't put you and your town at a economic disadvantage than a very big city. This whole Vice article goes into it,
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ezpk77/chattanooga-gigabit-fiber-network