Don’t the people of Spain already pay for roads and the new high-speed train (the AVE)? Spain is on track to becoming the country with the greatest number of high-speed rail kilometers. If all people pay for is what they use, there would not be any roads in the Pyrenees and precious few in Asturias. Spain would be a backwater.

There is a huge difference between the market for broadband service (today) and food. Because Spain has been ruled by the incumbent, Telefonica, for decades, it has been difficult for new entrants in the market. Telefonica has disproportionate market power and the European Commission has pointed this out more than once. The Spanish government wants to ensure that, like food, people have a lot of options for broadband service.

The government wants competition, which is good for the people, but not for Telefonica. So by subsidizing the rollout of high speed broadband networks and ensuring that those networks are open to all ISPs at reasonable prices, the ISPs can turn around the deliver service to Spanish residents and businesses. They compete with one another for the people’s business. This is the reason why the EU is moving towards “structural separation” – separating out the physical broadband network from the services so that the company who owns the physical network does not hog it and exclude all the others who deliver services.

Finally, in your analogy about food: in the US, fast food is “cheap”, artificially so, not necessarily because of the free market but because of government subsidies for corn syrup and other stuff. We have already seen the disastrous effects of private companies doing anything they way without government regulation — in the banking industry. The so-called “free market” in banking was not free at all. It was and is dominated by a few market players. There’s not a lot of competition and it’s only getting worse. The banks are getting bigger. The best thing to do would be for the government to break them up and force them all to compete. I like competition. It’s a shame that other people don’t.

I would say that “food” is far more necessary to modern living, and yet, people seem to get that just fine without the government coming in and mandating that grocery stores sell food to everyone at “reasonable” prices. It’s free markets, not government confiscation of wealth, that get people the things they want efficiently and fairly, without anyone paying too much or too little through their bills or their taxes in any combination.