The Free Market Lie: Why Switzerland Has 25 Gbit Internet and America Doesn't

Switzerland offers 25 Gbit/s symmetric dedicated fiber internet at competitive prices because it treats physical fiber infrastructure as a neutral shared asset. Every home gets four dedicated point-to-point fiber strands terminating in open, neutral hubs where any ISP can connect. This creates genuine competition on service, price, and quality. The US suffers from territorial monopolies and shared P2MP architectures, while Germany wastes resources on redundant parallel infrastructure builds. Switzerland's model succeeded through deliberate regulation: a 2008 national fiber standard mandated four-fiber P2MP deployment, and when Swisscom tried to shift to a shared P2MP model in 2020, competition authority COMCO intervened, ultimately fining Swisscom 18 million francs and forcing a return to the open-access standard. The key lesson is that infrastructure is a natural monopoly — building it once as a shared neutral asset and letting ISPs compete on top produces better outcomes than either unregulated monopolies or wasteful parallel builds.