And even smaller towns have better internet than you’d think. I went to college in a town of ~5k people and the internet was fine, especially if you went with the local co-op internet. They were slightly more expensive but most years you’d get money back so it wasn’t really more expensive and the service was fantastic, sadly they were hard for the college students to use because they only offered yearly contracts unlike the big names.

ISPs should be better. But when you say ‘like utilities’ there’s been way too many for profit companies acting like local monopolies screwing people over too - look at Enron and now Xcel and CenterPoint trying to pass the cost of the Texas freeze to all of their customers all over the country because they lobbied for deregulation and Texas gave it to them. NONE of these companies should exist.