As a quibble the Australian strategy hasn't "worked" yet because they have only just put pen to paper. The project, if successful and on budget, will deliver high-speed internet to 98% of Australia's population at a cost of $1000 per person. Not per home, per person!

The argument for the plan is that it will fix a "market failure" by producing more value for its citizens than it costs. That is a tall order. Ask a family of four if they would rather have $4k or broadband. If you want to be collectivist about it then ask my block of my street (not in Oz) what they would use $150k for. If our block found $150k in a bag and had to vote on how to spend it I'm pretty sure "running optical fiber" wouldn't make the top 10.

Arguing that ideas only work at large, and even nationally large, scales is an evasion and not a defense. Yes, it is more efficient to do something for a street than a house; and more efficient to do something for a city rather than a street. But where price efficiencies end is where political efficiencies begin.

It is much easier politically to make each person pay $1k and then provide every person with the same service than it is to just subsidize a minority. In the case of Australia 25% of the entire country lives in the city of Sydney (5 million out of 20). The population of the entire state of New South Wales is 7 million. The population of the town I lived in, Blaxland*, is 10,000. It is pricier per person to run broadband to Blaxland than it is in Sydney. Politically it is cheaper to run broadband to the whole state (everybody wins!) than it is to ask the 5 million voters of Sydney to subsidize the 2 million voters of not Sydney.

This kind of political efficiency that uses price efficiency language only becomes more ridiculous in the much larger US. If you squint really hard you can pretend that something is more price efficient for 20 million people than 5 but it is impossible to pretend that something is more price efficient for 300 million people than 30.

* this page about Blaxland notes "Blaxland has the dubious honour of being the only town in the Blue Mountains with a McDonalds!" I lived there when it opened in 1990; people lined up hours before the opening to be the first in and people also derided its crass consumerism. These groups overlapped heavily.