You're not wrong, but the definition of "consumer harm" used in practice hinges on short-termism and is price-centered right now. "This won't raise prices...for now, at least" is, by itself, an alarmingly strong argument in this arena, irrespective of market health or sustainability of competition.

The Biden administration has made some steps to counter that, we'll see if it's really a thing.

I guess I need to cut back on the heroin.

My reply wasn't asking for help to find an internet service provider. There are actual monopolists extracting monopoly rents right this minute. They're causing genuine consumer harm right now, so stopping this harm should be the priority of regulators.

Where there is no ability to access competitive offerings, these actual monopolists are a different league of economic pathology from markets where consumers can access competition by clicking around in their browsers.

But yours isn't a hard case of monopoly either, the main thing preventing you from creating a competing ISP is your local laws, which are failing antitrust to the point one wonders how they ever came to be ?!?

(We also shouldn't discount the importance of network effects.)

I have the latest dish model, live on a one acre property with a relatively large clearing, and I still struggle with the extremely wide field of view of the clear sky (no trees, hills or other occluding items) which it needs - I simply can’t get 24hrs of uninterrupted service, and performance is extremely variable. This is even after mounting it some 25ft in the air to reduce occlusion issues as much as possible. Starlink needs an unobstructed view right down to surprisingly low on the horizon for 24 hours of solid service, which many, many homes simply won’t be able to provide.

Starlink is incredible for what it is, but it’s not magic and becomes very hard to use reliably in urban areas at least with the current dishes and tech stack they are using. In many urban neighbourhoods it will be close to impossible to get a reliable 24 hrs of service unless you can knock down your neighbours homes and trees too.

Starlink is best used in situations where there are almost no other options, or as a backup connection to another more reliable one, for most people. It is not a great replacement for almost any fixed line service, if you have that option. Perhaps this changes in future, but people should stop just suggesting starlink in its current form as the panacea to all ISP problems.

Occlusion appears to be the single biggest enemy of starlink, and it’s super easily occluded - so much so, the app helps you measure/approximate the occlusion in your intended use space via your phones cameras before you buy.

There are approximately ~1 gazllion wireless internet providers where I live.

2) For many people, wireless and wireline internet providers are not substitutable.

You couldn’t get me to put up with 5G latencies because I play multiplayer video games and you couldn’t get me to put up with 5G bandwidth because I need to ship hundreds-of-gigabytes video files around and I’m not putting up with sub-gigabit upload speeds.

Just be glad you weren't around 15 years ago

Even if I didn't have symmetric gigabit, I also was working with 720p and 1080p video up until about 2013 and not 6K. Requirements shift over time.

any other examples of local monopolies

Maybe that is not legally possible where you are, but there is nothing inherent about emergency services resulting in extortionate pricing.