If the market supported competition, it would exist. People in America have lives outside of the internet (some do). It is not much more than a time waster at work and Wikipedia portal at home, for most people. Throw in some Netflix, Hulu, and Youtube here and there and
most households probably use less than 20GB of bandwidth a month.
I'm a software engineer. My job is 100% driven by the internet (I'm no web developer, though). I bleed packets. Even so, my monthly usage is around 60GB on average. I'm sure others get close to that 250GB Comcast cap, but the *vast* majority never do. If you think otherwise, you're kidding yourself.
The whole share-the-infrastructure idea has been done. It failed.
If I'm a company and I'm told that after I spend a ton of money laying fiber that I then have to turn around and wholesale it to my competitors, I'm going to think long and hard if I want to make that initial investment. Sharing infrastructure is only one piece of the puzzle. You then have to have peering agreements, or straight up purchase bandwidth to resell.
I find it funny that you're lauding the efforts of Apple and Amazon. They are building their business around exactly what you despise; purchased content.
