Wouldn't just providing better service require less effort and result in more goodwill?

Not a US person here, but I'd be interested in knowing if there are any 'customer-friendly' alternatives available. For example, I'm in the UK and specifically chose Zen internet as my broadband provider for its more customer-centric terms over the many other broadband providers available to the UK market.

Any "customer friendly" business in the US is just in the pre-"milk it for all it's worth" phase. They haven't been bought by private equity yet, they're unencumbered by finicky and short sighted investors, and people at the company are largely still a name & a face, rather than an expense line item on some spreadsheet.

There are smaller ISPs around the US that may or may not be more consumer-friendly, but they tend to be very limited in terms of their regions and availability. Even in urban areas, the choice tends to be between the standard duopoly of either DSL or cable, and the dominant providers tend to aggressively undercut on price or lobby & litigate until the competitors go out of business.

I spent a good deal of effort 6 years ago to find an alternative in Denver, CO, that wasn't Comcast or CenturyLink. There are a number of business ISPs, but only a one or two residential ISPs. Verso Networks is what I got. Excellent service, but they were geographically limited.

In the suburbs of Denver, you have a choice of Comcast or CenturyLink if you're lucky.

Yes but it wouldn’t make as much money which is the main issue with having for-profit enterprises control every good and service

because capitalism means they get to do whatever they want to be more efficient, i.e. extract more profit

but how and from whom do cable companies 'extract' their profit?

Capitalism doesn’t make cable suck. There are far more profitable companies with non-hellish customer experiences.

This is just a bad philosophy and short term thinking. Cable would be more profitable if they wanted to be. Blaming their shittiness on an economic system isn’t really accurate.

The economic system should have weeded them out. It has failed.

The cynic in me says it was probably lobby groups that kept the favorable status quo going for the incumbents. Do people in the US have any decent choices when choosing cable operators?

Almost all cable companies have geographic exclusivity.

Which is another failure of the economic system...

Natural monopolies are a known failure state of capitalism. This is a failure to intervein properly.

Demanding perfection is a flawed argument, mainly used to shut down a conversation