Facebook and Google have are far more powerful and inescapable for writers than for the general public, as those companies are the primary way the public discovers and consumes news media online. A regular person can easily delete their Facebook profile and switch to Duckduckgo, but the same would be suicide for a newspaper: they have to go where the eyeballs are.

This is insightful. Sometimes I forget that journalists occasionally have points-of-view that are not quite aligned with the public - I think they forget that too. I suspect that's also why middle-aged, balding men (frequently English professors) who are somehow irresistible to (much) younger women are over-represented in novels as heroes.

I think there's your problem. The FANG companies have such a higher profile than ISPs, and universal exposure among readers (vs. anyone who might live outside the US, or where Comcast doesn't have a monopoly), so articles on them will attract more attention.

See $argument-about-the-decline-of-journalism and so on.

I can stand up an encrypted session to prevent ISPs from having incidental access to my data. I get the exact same service (a dumb bit pipe). Moving from one ISP to another is a lightweight operation that doesn't limit what I can do beyond throughput and latency. I've already switched between 3 different isps today without even noticing, and it will be 5 by the time I go to bed.

The Facebook/Apple/Googles of the world are all designed around vendor lock-in, designing tools such that they always get incidental access to my data, then exploiting that access to the hilt.

Oh, and ISPs get beat up plenty too.

Google and Facebook (and Amazon, to a lesser extent) are for-profit surveillance systems at their core. How could you not demand oversight and regulation of such systems in a democracy?

All of that applies unchanged to Verizon, Comcast, et al, even if they aren't currently doing so.

"My broadband and mobile providers see a much slimmer cross section of my life"

I'm not sure this is true in general? I agree that Google and Facebook have a fair bit of data about me. They have vastly more data about average users who use Facebook sign-in, don't block tracking, leave location services on, etc. But broadband and mobile providers see every site most users visit (even if your DNS isn't your ISP), along with metadata about those interactions. And mobile providers track location effectively non-stop, even if location services are off, plus extensive metadata on calls and texts.

And that's before we get into the monopoly issues; Verizon now owns the scraps of data-hog Yahoo so it's operating in both domains. I'm not sure why I would assume Oath is any less scary as an aggregator and warehouse than Google. (Less secure, undoubtedly, but that's not a mark in its favor. "Verizon sucks at technology" does not make me feel better.)

"How could you not demand oversight and regulation of such systems in a democracy?"

Again, my argument isn't "Facebook and Google are beyond reproach", it's "why are we more worried about FANG than their analogues who also have monopoly control over users and in-depth access to people's locations and call records?"

The other issue with regulation, of course, is that a key concern for all of these companies is that they hand data to the government, often without so much as a warrant. (And yet again, mobile providers are noticeably worse about this than any other player - except Yahoo, which is now tied to a mobile provider.) That doesn't make regulation a bad idea, but it certainly cripples my faith in it as a full solution.

There's no law of the universe saying one has to address bad actors in a specific order or sequentially.

Furthermore, Equifax is a problem that the US needs to solve by themselves. Google & Facebook are a global problem.

Don't lump Google in there.