Cisco gear is expensive because it is expensive to design and expensive to manufacture equipment that can shuttle frames between multiple OC-192 circuits at sub-millisecond speeds across a purpose-built backplane that won't lock up under the load, and because it is even more expensive to design the software that will manage the forwarding databases on that equipment under the strain of multiple global routing table updates every second without ever hiccupping, and because for all that effort, you can count the number of US companies that will buy that kind of a product in any real volume on two hands.

It's a weird argument about the scarcity of bandwidth that suggests that it's all a price fixing scam by Cisco. Cisco, for what it's worth, does not make the majority of its money on big-ass backbone routers.

It is, in fact, rather akin to the idea that Southwest Airlines tickets cost $200 because Boeing has artificially inflated the price of the 737.

I think using the Stockholm syndrome is an absurd metaphor in this case. In the Stockholm syndrome, the victim defends the attacker. In this case, the 'attacker' is the regulation, and I'm opposing it.

Seriously though, I think I've addressed some of those questions elsewhere in the thread. Many other countries you would compare against have heavily subsidized consumer internet via government spending. Many countries also have a significantly higher population density than the US, or they had less existing infrastructure (laying fiber is cheaper if you are building all new roads anyway).

As for why Cisco or Juniper equipment is expensive: it is expensive because it is relatively low-volume industrial-strength gear that needs to run far in excess of 99.999% reliability while supporting an absurdly large number of protocols and standards. To put the problem as a bit of a tautology, if you think it is so absurdly overpriced, why aren't you raising a venture round to build cheaper gear?

(Incidentally, I think you probably could, but it is still a hard problem that requires time to solve. Not all things that could theoretically be improved can be improved instantly.)