Many places in the United States don't have the luxury. I'm in a county of half a million people and there are are basically two options: Comcast cable (which is decently fast for downloads) and a variety of resellers who all run on Verizon's DSL network.
No fiber options unless I want to give Comcast the blood of my firstborn and then pay $300 a month for the privilege. Verizon has been promising fiber "any day now" for the past 10 years.
What is the actual harm / collusion? You can choose from a wide variety of ISPs, which are decent to your own admission, but the harm is it is not fiber ?
The past two years should've made it clear that public education and the workforce increasingly depend on having access to bandwidth. Of course this was already a trend, but the pandemic accelerated it, affecting entire household bandwidth consumption at once. I disagree with the implication that wanting (needing?) fiber is somehow equivalent to whining.
I can effectively choose between two: Comcast and Verizon/their resellers. I said Comcast _downstream_ speeds are decent. Their _upstream_ speeds are atrocious.
Comcast only provides coax. Verizon and their resellers only support aging copper DSL lines.
No fiber is available unless I pay Comcast literally thousands of dollars just to bring the line to my house. Then they want to charge me $300 a month on top of that.
I did not suggest there was harm or collusion between Comcast and Verizon. I only pointed out that your experience of having a plethora of acceptable ISPs is unusual in most of the United States.
In most places in the US you have one or two choices of providers, and prices are often pretty high for good internet service - as much as double what it could be in a more competitive market, with speeds that don't match. Even in major cities, upload speeds with any major provider suck... I got the gigabit from Comcast just because I wanted the 35mbps up, whereas the next plan down (600mbps download) was going to only give 15mbps up. And despite being in San Francisco, our only real choices in our building are Comcast and At&t.
No fiber options unless I want to give Comcast the blood of my firstborn and then pay $300 a month for the privilege. Verizon has been promising fiber "any day now" for the past 10 years.