And who is going to force the ISPs to interconnect at the city level?
Customers, of course! Who else ever forces ISPs to do anything?
For competitive reasons there is no peering in my city. The nearest peering points are several hundred miles away, in different directions, and even those are not shared in common by the local ISPs.
Doesn't make sense, does it? As the Internet becomes more and more mission critical for more people, you will see non-technical customers questioning the chaos. Once the insurance companies realize that ISPs in some areas are not providing proper resiliency, they will raise the premiums for business insurance in those areas and this will provide the economic incentive for customers to force ISPs to build a sensible 21st century utility architecture. --Michael Dillon