[_bxg1]

The ISP's are more important because of their physical locality. It's infinitely easier to create a competitor for Facebook than a competitor for Time Warner (Google, one of the world's most powerful companies, tried and failed).

That said, with the amount of ubiquity and sway on society that self-proclaimed platforms like Facebook and Google have started to have, I would not be opposed to regulating some of those as utilities too. But that's a more nuanced issue. The ISP issue is so black and white as to be hilarious, if it weren't so disheartening.

[corerius]

It seems to me that I have more choice between ISPs than in auction sites, as an example.

The tendency towards monopoly in networks makes all these cases similar I think.

[_bxg1]

Most people have exactly one choice of ISP. If you're lucky, there might be a second one with the same price and 1/10 the speed.

Whereas I could go build an auction site myself if I really wanted to. Scaling a business takes work, but the power of software is that it requires no material resources to get started. Laying fiber is not only immensely expensive in and of itself, but ISP's have also lobbied to stack the deck severely against newcomers: https://www.wired.com/2016/09/utility-poles-important-future...

[deadmik3]

I think the amount of effort and traction you'd get from trying to launch your own auction site to compete with eBay would be about equal to getting a couple shovels and burying some cat5 around your neighborhood to compete with comcast

[komali2]

You aren't allowed to bury cat5 in your neighborhood without government approval, and they'd tell you to just lease time off Comcast lines.

What will you connect your cat5 cable to?

[deadmik3]

Plug your router into your neighbor's, and everyone else that wants to join your new ISP. I don't see the difficulty; it's just as easy as starting a new eBay site and getting people to sign up

[wvenable]

You can create an ISP and then you have to work to get people to sign up.

You can create a eBay site and then you have to work to get people to sign up.

And your argument is the hard part of making an eBay site is signing people up and hand-wave over the build part of both these things? Apples to Spaceships comparison.

[komali2]

False equivalence. Not only does eBay have actual alternatives, the start up cost is much higher for a new ISP.

Startup cost is not equivalent to "getting customers" cost. I can launch eBay 2 tomorrow, I cannot do that for Comcast2.

[_bxg1]

Not if eBay started making extremely anti-consumer choices like Comcast has. At some point it would get to be too much, and competition would step in. We see that starting to happen a bit with Facebook lately, although the network effect there is stronger than with an auction site. But Comcast can do whatever the hell it wants, because nobody can even try to provide a way out.

[komali2]

For selling a product, off the top of my head we've got eBay, Craigslist, Facebook marketplace, nextdoor, and whatever other social network you can think of. Amazon, with a bit of work. Crowdfunding sites if you wanna go that route. If that thing you're selling is a car there's specialized websites for that (shift, for example).

I have only ever been able to have Comcast, ever. In the 9 houses in 6 different cities in 3 different states I've lived, always Comcast was the only option.

[drak0n1c]

Is it infinitely easier? Google tried and failed to make a Facebook competitor too.

[_bxg1]

Correction: They succeeded in making one, it just didn't take off as a business. There's a difference. When it comes to simply getting a certain piece of functionality, even an open-source community is free to go build a competitor and give it away for free. The obstacles when it comes to internet infrastructure are encountered before you even get in the gate.

[monocasa]

They also essentially failed to make an ISP, so not a great comparison.