[supriyo-biswas]

Free market principles do not apply when the switching costs are non-trivial and information asymmetry makes it difficult for the consumer to know what’s really going on.

Nobody is gonna complain about their ISP when the conversation is simply this: “Aw, shucks, [startup-product] doesn’t work, at least [established-product] works everywhere. The new thing is probably crap anyway.”

[a-user-you-like]

We need common sense regulation in this space, not what we have now. What we have now is Google fiber being told to pound sand all over the country even though they offered to pay for everything when laying down a separate, competing fiber network. Why were they rebuffed? Verizon/Att has the local gov. wrapped up. Let’s break THAT gov-enforced monopoly.

[noirscape]

It's in some cases not even a choice. ISP service in the US is to my understanding also tied up in regional availability (it's less of an issue in Europe since afaict infrastructure is just... better in Europe, but even in Europe you have regions where the choices are between shit and slightly worse smelling shit; hence why net neutrality still matters here), and many of the more rural areas just have a single provider so your only choice to change ISP is to... move location. Which is frankly absurd.

The result is that said provider is basically running a regional monopoly, but this doesn't get regulated against because the total ISP market isn't monopolized.

[Spivak]

I’ll be the first to talk about market failures but the mere existence of friction does mean markets stop working. There’s some amount of friction with every market interaction. There is absolutely a market failing when it comes to ISPs but it’s not really friction that’s the issue, switching ISPs in an area where you actually have options is a few phone calls and scheduling a time for someone to do your wiring.

Now if every store in a 100 mile radius only had Coke, then switching to Pepsi just got a lot harder despite the two products being literal drop-in replacements for one another.

[quickthrower2]

Switching to pepsi is easier as it is a single dimensional change. Switching ISP will have a multitude of effects. Most unknown (how reliable is the new one? will they give me hidden extra charges? what are their TOS? are they blocking XYZ service I need down the road? do they spy on DNS traffic?) and so on. Let alone a decent amount of time on the phone organising it and potentially some early exit penalties.

[thayne]

Also setup costs.