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...
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
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
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.
Well, the argument is that if you don't like eBay it's easy to just go make your own. I'm not disagreeing with that. I'm just assuming that part of "making your own" is getting the other users to sign up, since an auction site with no one to bid isn't very useful. So it's the same with ISPs: if you don't like it just make your own.
But what makes eBay eBay isn't their startup cost, it's the millions of people buying and selling items that make it a usable service instead of just one guy posting pictures of his funko pops for sale.
So yeah, I could launch ebay2 tomorrow but it would just be me on there. I could actually do that with Comcast2 as well, just by turning on a computer in my house but if it's not connected to anything else it's about as useless as the ebay2 running on it.
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.
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.
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...