Given that the argument about municipal fiber centers around a dynamic of large corpos preventing competition from small municipalities (by lobbying for state level prohibitions, etc) that seems besides the point. If a city can't get its own network off the ground, then the whole thing becomes a noop (apart from having wasted the money, which they would have done on something else regardless).

But when cities have the population density to support multiple competing Internet providers with decent physical layers and non-extractionary terms, then there generally doesn't seem to be much of a call for the city to provide its own services in the first place.

Furthermore cities that are incompetent about deploying infrastructure are going to be similarly incompetent at facilitating the permit process for private infrastructure - giving governmentesque incumbent providers a hold over a captive market regardless. So while this is a general problem that deserve its own exploration, it wouldn't seem to have much bearing on Internet access specifically. The real concern is municipalities that would be perfectly capable of providing Internet service (along with the rest of their municipal services), yet are being held back from even trying.

(Also I don't know what the Japan example demonstrates anything because 1. Japan and 2. that 1/3 ownership stake belies a much bigger controlling interest due to being the government)

My point is that all of these points of "competition" would merely introduce tradeoffs that are worse than what I currently have.

Congestion/latency/data caps - I've observed no congestion, and have no traffic caps. "Competition" would create differentiation on providing less service.

Privacy - it's a municipal ISP. I'm pretty sure they're not selling my data to the surveillance industry. If it turns out they are, then I have recourse through the local democratic process rather than the standard "tough shit" response from a corpo. Given how the markets for cell service, webapps, etc work I don't have much faith that even in a competitive market, this would end up as a point of competition.

Email / website hosting / etc has nothing to do with the physical connection and therefore already has strong competition across the entire Internet. And actually this applies to the privacy point as well, with VPNs.

The model of the wholesale network is GPON. They obviously didn't string a dedicated fiber from the NOC to each house. So either speed is constrained by the gear the wholesale network buys, or the wholesale network would need to run a bunch of extra home runs so individual provider gets their own home run to light with their own gear.

I could see this last bit being a benefit in 10-20 years when gigabit isn't considered fast enough if the municipal fiber doesn't keep up. But given the municipal fiber built out the gigabit network while the coax incumbent was happy collecting rent on old infrastructure, I'm willing to give them a pass for the foreseeable future.