Greatest damn city in the whole damn world.
Which is sort of like saying, "Cleanest, best smelling septic tank in the whole world."
Paying for them is a simple matter of raising taxes on wealthy people.
By which you mean, confiscating some portion of the wealth of those wealthier than yourself. The problem with that plan is that if you do not confiscate it all at once, those with the bulk of it will move it beyond the government's reach when it becomes obvious that that is the plan. And if you do confiscate it all at once, there is not enough of it to cover the cost of what your are proposing. Oh yeah, one other problem, the vast majority of wealth can only be used to pay for stuff if there is someone willing and able to pay for that wealth (that is, most wealth is some form of property).
The primary reason there is usually only a very small number of ISP's that serve a particular area is simple, and it doesn't involve tin foil hats or conspiracy theories. It is that building broadband infrastructure is fucking expensive. Everything from the hardware, to the permits, but especially the construction.
The problem with that theory is that I was actually alive and paying attention when the local monopolies were created...and your argument is EXACTLY the argument made by the various cable companies to get the government to GRANT them a monopoly in the various local areas. What nobody in government thought about (and if you tried to say it, you were called a crackpot) was, if cable was a natural monopoly, why did they need the government to grant them a monopoly? Wouldn't the company that did the best just end up with a monopoly?
Except that isn't what happened. What happened was that local municipalities were allowed to grant local monopolies for cable service. Then once every area where it was profitable to offer cable service had cable service, the big players began buying up everyone else. It didn't matter that they had lousy service, they had a monopoly, and the local municipalities discovered that they no longer had any leverage because they could no longer take the franchise for the local area back and give it to someone else because there was no one else.
and unfortunately that requires police with guns and military gear now due to the influence of the NRA.
In the U.S., the police have always needed guns (at least to some degree). I am not sure how the influence of the NRA can be held responsible for the police "needing" military gear, considering that police began using military gear as laws restricting gun ownership increased. It is worth noting that when it was legal for the common citizen to own automatic firearms, the police were perfectly satisfied to be armed with civilian weaponry.
The hardest part of climbing the ladder of success is getting through the crowd at the bottom.