It is exactly how it works - that’s purely american exceptionalism… China, India, Japan (which is REALLY spread out, btw!) are also big and sparse, that doesn’t stop them from doing such things

You realize that each state in the US can be seen as a country too, right? If you didn’t only have a tiny handful of private, greedy ISPs, you’d literally have the same situation as europe, except that country = state and continent = federated states… just because the country USA as a whole is big does not change anything and is just american exceptionalism