Basic internet should be a utility. The FCC should define a minimum standard and everyone should be wired for that and it should be a nominal fee. There can still be ISPs that provide faster services for $$$.
Local government would run the fibre network and terminate everything to a central POP (or several). They're responsible to maintain the physical network and ensure every connection can obtain the minimum speed and latency standard. This could even be cable/DSL/wireless, so long as the minimum speed is hit. They can contract this out, but it's largely irrelevant to the consumer.
At the POP is where ISPs take over and provide the upstream connection to the actual internet, and this is who the consumer pays. The ISPs can compete based on whatever combination of price, speed, transfer limits and/or add-on services they choose.
The scariest thing you can say to me is "we're the government and we're going to run your fiber" when almost all of my local municipally run services are barely functioning.
In my city, we have wooden sewers in some place over a hundred years old, gas pipes blowing up city blocks, streets which collapse into sink holes, and now you say "oh the government should surely get involved?". Preposterous.
Where I live (Montgomery County, MD), the county municipal services are far, far superior to what the private folks do, whether it's refuse collection, leaf removal, or snow removal. I can't speak to their efficiency though since I haven't scrutinized the budgets.
If you want another big-city infrastructure example from the US, look at Empire City Subway. This is a company which has exclusive franchise from NYC to maintain a network of underground conduit in Manhattan, which they can use for their parent company (Verizon) but must also sell access to any other carrier who needs it.
I could imagine a similar approach that actually extends to the residential consumer. I live in a building which has FiOS in the street, but the landlord doesn't care to provide access to Verizon to wire the building, so I'm stuck with the legacy cable provider (which is far worse). If by law all buildings connected to a common utility-scale fiber network and I was simply buying transit from my ISP, I'd be much happier.
Very generous words. I lived in a building once where the landlord flat out told me that we can only have Comcast because they paid him. Obviously, YMMV. In my experience it was more malicious than simply not caring.
The problems of speed, transfer limits, and add on services are wholly created by incumbent ISPs, and no, we don't need the dinosaur business model competing to perpetuate them.
I've started to wonder if everybody should even be wired. Starlink is about to show us all that rural internet is better served with satellites than wires. In doing so, they'll show that 20 years of taxes paid to the government that the government paid to big broadband companies to build rural internet that big businesses just pocketed for profit - it was all a total waste. Not just a waste because the broadband companies are greedy bastards but also a waste because wires are the wrong way to connect rural areas. Another demonstration that government involvement in technology leads to extremely expensive and wasteful investments in the wrong places. And you want it to be a utility?