If it's put up for sale there'd be nothing stopping the big players from buying it up.

I suspect the regulators who wrote the laws that are preventing this are wise to your idea and its the actual right of way that they are going after. The only advantage that a municipality has over a private company or not-for-profit, is a monopoly on the control of rights of ways in their geographic area. That's why municipality is can do this- private entities would have to get their permission to install a network. And it would come at high cost.

With the right leadership, .gov has a ton of advantages.

These include:

- Access to fewer-strings capital with bonding.

- Lower staff turnover.

- Better buying power and terms than a small/mid sized company.

- No taxes

- No profits

I used to run shared service offerings within a .gov. We almost always beat market pricing for most things. S3 and O365 are the notable exceptions.

Municipalities might be able to create bonds that have tax breaks.