[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.

[deadmik3]

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.

[Sohcahtoa82]

But the availability is what matters.

If I want to make an ISP available to even just a small neighborhood, we're talking tens of thousands of dollars of investment. Scaling it up so an entire city can use my ISP is an investment in the millions of dollars.

If I want to make a new eBay available to the world, it's a couple days of software development for a proof of concept and a few dollars for a VM in AWS/Azure/GCC. Polishing it a bit and scaling it up is only a few more months development and possibly a couple thousand in server costs, which your revenue would be scaling nicely with.

[komali2]

When was microsoft microsoft

when was twitter twitter

when was facebook facebook

Comcast was an Internet Service Provider when it Provided a Service that allowed access to the Internet.

It will take far longer to route your home server to global DNS, all while bypassing comcast, than it would to register that server's IP on the DNS with your new URL, ebay2.com

But, that's just the same thing I, and many others, have been saying, for about five posts deep now, so I'm curious where this fight of yours is coming from.

[wvenable]

By that argument, eBay itself on September 3, 1995 wasn't eBay either. When over the last 22 years did eBay actually become eBay?