Google has a near-monopoly because it grew out of a natural monopoly; their product was so much more innovative that people flocked to use it and they have managed to maintain their technological lead by constant reinvestment.

An enormous difference, and one of which you are definitely aware, is the existence of legal monopolies for many network infrastructure providers, as well as lobbying of state governments to limit or prevent the building of publicly-owned network infrastructure in many jurisdictions.

I'm not locked in to using Google in any way other than by consumer preference. I use Bing as well but frankly I find it an inferior product.

Google isn't one of the major internet providers here, whether Google's business has proper competition or not is not my point.

My point is that we pay ISPs as much as we pay for the rest of the computing infrastructure, that they are a major player, with tons of money and high profits, and terrible service. That they aren't acting like the big boys, even though they have the cash to.

ISPs are currently entrenched without competition. The current FCC fudges stats to wrongly state that there is competition in the ISP space, whereas in reality almost nobody has more than one broadband option.

The point is that they're not particularly profitable in comparison to Google, even though in theory Google plays in competitive markets while ISPs are "entrenched without competition."

So what? That doesn't obviate the possibility that their profits are maintained through corruption.

Yes, it's far far easier to switch from google to duckduckgo or some other search provider. Or from any google sub-product to a competitor than it is to change your ISP. And that's even if you have another ISP to change to.