Its not like it is some monumental task. Fiber is cheaper than copper, and we managed to lay copper telephone lines and power lines to everybody. Where I live right now didn't even have DSL available at any point in time, the local telecomm didn't want to spend money on replacing some of the poorly functioning 60 year old copper lines despite everyone clamoring for any kind of wired connection. And yet a startup ISP managed to not only lay down gigabit direct to home fiber to the entire county in under 2 years, but they provide it for significantly cheaper than people's wireless/mobile internet. And they are still expanding across the entire state so are obviously earning money from it.
Existing telecomms have zero excuses after being given billions of dollars to do this after seeing startup fiber companies manage to do it profitably after the fact in even in some of the lowest density areas east of the Mississippi.
which has a case study of US Steel used lobbying as a weapon against the rest of us by getting protectionism against steel imports because they felt entitled to keep making steel with pre-WWII open health furnaces that had been paid for long ago but produced more expensive and lower quality steel than international competitors who were using basic oxygen, electric arc and other modern processes. In a market economy they would have been forced to go out of business or invest in new equipment —- that is, make a disinvestment that they didn’t want to make (that’s why they call it “capital(ism)”), it’s like the capital makes decisions on its own.
Circa 1980 almost all futuristic thinkers thought the copper network was going to be ripped out to replace it with fiber because fiber was clearly better in the long term, but what we did get was much more complex and path dependent because in favorable locations cable TV was a great business that built out infrastructure which could be repurposed, DSL was a good solution for crowded little countries like South Korea and the UK, etc. Like those open hearth furnaces, bad infrastructure that exists drives out good infrastructure that hasn’t been built yet.
Somehow, society making decisions on its own is a Stephen King story.. maybe direct democrats should just not use that name that always triggers. How about "civilianism"?
Current day examples (which are a bit more nuanced than in Thurow's day, but I'd argue the Gresham bug picture is roughly the same as what you said. "First-mover foot-gun"?)
-Tesla vs BYD (even though Tesla's factories in China are most productive)
-NVIDIA infra (note the optical fiber history repeating itself )
Literary case study:
The villain in Snow Crash is a missing element of to-day's oligarch periodic table (Evangelical sham-futurist)
Good names are the first hard quest. To ward off Lasch's alt-institutionism
Once an area has its shit in order regulatory-wise: yes. Here my house org will upgrade from 1- to 10-gbit next month, mostly cause it also bumps the wifi generation to the latest and the cost difference was neglible. Previous hardware was end of life , so we had to change stuff regardless.
many such cases...