[db48x]

That may or may not be true, but in this case many cities signed exclusivity agreements with cable companies in the 60s and 70s when cable was becoming popular. Back then it was not technically feasible to have multiple cable companies sharing the same cable; the same set of analog channels had to be broadcast to every subscriber. Multiple subscribers, often hundreds of them in apartments, were attached to the same run of coaxial cable in a daisy chain or using splitters. Those agreements carried over to internet service once the cable companies started offering it. It made sense 50 years ago, but today it means that we haven’t actually had much of a free market. Now the FTTH is cheap and readily available, that is starting to reverse simple because the monopoly agreements only apply to _cable_ networks, not to fiber networks.