ISPs are natural monopolies [1]. In the US we're seeing increasing market share concentration by some pretty big juggernauts in the space (Comcast, Verizon). So what you're seeing is a lack of ISP choices for consumers and in many instances only 1 choice and that in my opinion is far more problematic than what Google and FB are doing. I'm not defending censorship by any party here really, but I definitely think censorship at the ISP level is a much bigger problem.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly

I read that wikipedia page. I'd say I have more choice with ISPs than with search engines. Won't you say 'natural monopoly' applies to google too at this point?

The "top tier" has three options that are all basically equivalent in terms of quality:

google.com

bing.com

baidu.com

Other less popular but in many cases still excellent options include:

yandex.com

gigablast.com

lycos.com

askjeeves.com

duckduckgo.com

qwant.com

And the list goes on and on and on... these are just the "similar to google" search engines. There are also search engines for particular topics, search engines that take a different paradigm ("semantic search"), and with beer money you can even buy search engine+crawler software packages and build your own search engine for the portion of the web you care about.

And major sites like Wikipedia and Amazon and all the social sites have their own search features so you don't even need a third party search engine within most of the big silos.

If you're using google it's because either a) you want to use google; or b) you're monumentally lazy. Not because there aren't other options.

You can also write your own crawler and search engine. In fact, as literally all of these options demonstrate, with a surprisingly small amount of VC cash you could build your own "more than good enough" search engine. The same amount of cash probably wouldn't be nearly enough to build out a Verizon or Comcast competitor in even one city.

Conversely, I have exactly 3 options for ISPs in my area. One of them is the local equivalent of "build your own search engine" (and about similar quality). So actually 2 options -- Comcast and Verizon. There is no long tail of other providers, and what's more, there almost certainly never will be because acquiring the land rights would be enormously expensive. Oh and BTW I live in a major city; outside of cities you're even more screwed.

And even if we just limit ourselves to the "big best in class" search engines -- google, bing, baidu, duckduckgo -- that's still twice the number of options that most people have for ISP in the US.

It takes me all of 10 seconds to type duckduckgo.com, and maybe 30 to switch default search engines for the browser.

I don't think I could switch an ISP in 10 days, let alone seconds.

I can get 50-100++Mbps from Comcast, or 1Mbps (maybe) from CenturyLink, and then... no actually that's it. And 1Mbps would not let me do a lot of stuff online anymore.

So effectively I have no choice, unless I want to stop all video watching, downloading games regularly (not gonna soak 18 hours of 100% of my bandwidth to download a new title), etc.

> If you can't access your website on ISP choose another ISP.

There are thousands upon thousands of webpage hosts on the internet.

In many areas of the US, however, you may have only one option for ISP. You either take it, or you go without internet.

How many ISPs can you choose from where you live ? They have an effective monopoly or duopoly in many regions in the US.

in addition to that, "but what about google" is no defence for what last mile ISPs are doing. If google ever becomes too ubiquitous as a gatekeeper (it's already at that point according to the EU antitrust commission) they'll also need to be regulated.

I live in India.. I have about 10-15 options, but not sure if they are subcontracting from the same guy or what. I need to look into it.

>How many ISPs can you choose from where you live ?

Let me ask you this. How many search engines can you choose form, really? How many phone OS's can you choose from?

Search engines? At least 5 that I've used. Google Bing ddg Baidu yandex. Cost of switching is like 10 seconds.

Phone OS? 3, one of which is literally open source and used by a bunch of other competitors. Cost of switching is about $150 and a day.

ISP in the US I have actually no choice. I'm crossing my fingers that CenturyLink or municipal fiber will become a thing, but I ain't optimistic about it. Cost of switching if there was a second one would be around $200+ for modem, installation fees, etc, and last time I did cus I moved it took like a week.

For many Americans(including me) there is only one ISP to "choose".

Doesn't America have anti monopoly laws? Curious why those don't apply to ISPs . Isn't this an admission that 'net neutrality ' is a bandaid to the problem of ISP monopoly.

Also, Philosophically you won't really care about net neutrality if you have ISP choice. correct?

If nobody wants to dig and lay cable to offer services to a small town what are you gonna do? The US had very low population density so the cost of teaching small communities can be huge.

It got this way because the companies that are dominant ISPs today were not always ISPs; they were cable TV companies. The cable companies were allowed to have regional monopolies where a city would allow one cable company to serve all the people in the city, but they didn't have to share their networks with each other. This wasn't so bad, because the cable companies don't really make TV shows; they buy TV shows from HBO or whoever. In principle, it wouldn't really matter that much which cable company you you paid, because they all would have more or less the same options. Since they only offered broadcast services they didn't qualify as telecommunications services either, so Title 2 doesn't apply (Title 1 does instead). But then the internet was invented, and now the cable companies deliver internet service over the same networks as they provide TV.

And they're still technically not monopolies, because even if they're the only place you can get 100MBps service, you might still be able to get 2Mbps service from the phone company (or dial-up service if you're more than a couple of miles from the POP), and internet service is internet service.

The phone companies also have regional monopolies, but because they have to share their network with everyone there are lots of options. I can buy my DSL from a dozen companies, but the circuit will be provisioned by AT&T. This means that none of these companies are likely to act in bad faith; their customers can switch easily, and the FCC is generally watching.

Having more options is indeed another way out; the cable companies have actually gotten a lot better in the last few years, if you're in a market where there are other choices. In some cities you can get Google Fiber, and cable there has suddenly started competing. In SF you can get Sonic.net's fiber service, etc.

> Doesn't America have anti monopoly laws? Curious why those don't apply to ISPs . Isn't this an admission that 'net neutrality ' is a bandaid to the problem of ISP monopoly.

You are correct in that the root of this problem is that our anti-monopoly laws aren't being enacted here because there's too much money being made by those on top. We should fix that problem as well.

However, I'm not convinced that "just get a different ISP" would work in the US like it does elsewhere. Service companies here are very good at hiding details and the US generally ends up with a small handful of choices that are all terrible. See also: Phones, Healthcare, Transportation

The vast majority of Americans do not have choice in ISP. Where I am, I have a choice between Cox and... well, Cox.