The tendency towards monopoly in networks makes all these cases similar I think.
Whereas I could go build an auction site myself if I really wanted to. Scaling a business takes work, but the power of software is that it requires no material resources to get started. Laying fiber is not only immensely expensive in and of itself, but ISP's have also lobbied to stack the deck severely against newcomers: https://www.wired.com/2016/09/utility-poles-important-future...
What will you connect your cat5 cable to?
You can create a eBay site and then you have to work to get people to sign up.
And your argument is the hard part of making an eBay site is signing people up and hand-wave over the build part of both these things? Apples to Spaceships comparison.
There is no competition for Comcast, there is for eBay. It appears your very premise is flawed but I welcome you to demonstrate why this isn't true.
It won't be that great, because he wants to share pictures of his kids and I want to sell my funko pops, but it's definitely easy. Unless your definition of an ISP inherently includes a connection to millions of people, in which case I don't understand why your definition of an eBay doesn't as well?
You also seem to forget that the "I" in ISP stands for Internet. Your connection to your neighbor is just a LAN/WAN and by definition is not an ISP.
How will you access global DNS?
Can I ask your motivations here? You seem very keen on muddying the waters in this discussion.
The argument isn't that it's easy, the argument is that it's possible. There is no guarantee of success but you can try. Why even start Facebook when we already have Myspace?
There are actual physical impediments to building your own ISP and natural monopolies involved. By comparison, just a lot of people using something doesn't make it monopoly.
Startup cost is not equivalent to "getting customers" cost. I can launch eBay 2 tomorrow, I cannot do that for Comcast2.
So yeah, I could launch ebay2 tomorrow but it would just be me on there. I could actually do that with Comcast2 as well, just by turning on a computer in my house but if it's not connected to anything else it's about as useless as the ebay2 running on it.
If I want to make an ISP available to even just a small neighborhood, we're talking tens of thousands of dollars of investment. Scaling it up so an entire city can use my ISP is an investment in the millions of dollars.
If I want to make a new eBay available to the world, it's a couple days of software development for a proof of concept and a few dollars for a VM in AWS/Azure/GCC. Polishing it a bit and scaling it up is only a few more months development and possibly a couple thousand in server costs, which your revenue would be scaling nicely with.
when was twitter twitter
when was facebook facebook
Comcast was an Internet Service Provider when it Provided a Service that allowed access to the Internet.
It will take far longer to route your home server to global DNS, all while bypassing comcast, than it would to register that server's IP on the DNS with your new URL, ebay2.com
But, that's just the same thing I, and many others, have been saying, for about five posts deep now, so I'm curious where this fight of yours is coming from.
I have only ever been able to have Comcast, ever. In the 9 houses in 6 different cities in 3 different states I've lived, always Comcast was the only option.
That said, with the amount of ubiquity and sway on society that self-proclaimed platforms like Facebook and Google have started to have, I would not be opposed to regulating some of those as utilities too. But that's a more nuanced issue. The ISP issue is so black and white as to be hilarious, if it weren't so disheartening.