US ISP Monopolies

Is this right given that ISPs have local monopolies?

The issue is local monopoly laws granted to ISP's by city governments. In order to encourage ISP's to invest the necessary money to build infrastructure in their jurisdictions, many of these places granted them monopolies. It's an issue of crony capitalism at the hyperlocal level.

Because people would have to move to change ISPs, there isn't any incentive for them to compete with each other. Network infrastructure is a natural monopoly, afterall. The best you ever get is a duopoly between fiber and cable, if you're lucky.

Money quotes:> Internet service providers (ISPs), such as Verizon, Comcast, AT&T and Charter [...] have deliberately restricted competition, kept prices high and used their armies of lobbyists to persuade state legislatures to ban towns and cities from building their own public networks.> ISPs have been able to get away with fostering pseudo-monopolies because they spend a lot of money to keep the regulatory environment and the conversation surrounding it murky. FCC Chairman A

It's basically because we allowed ISPs to monopolize vast swaths of the country leaving no real competition.

Because ISPs in the US have monopolies over their areas. There is no incentive to provide good service when you have no competition.

From all I have heard, places with better-regulated ISPs or even municipal broadband (gasp!) tend to have better service. You seem to be grinding a political axe rather than considering what the evidence says about the real-world effect of this particular change.The simple fact is, getting approval to put your network somewhere is not only really expensive, but already heavily regulated, and this grants a de facto regional monopoly to companies like Comcast and Time-Warner in places where the

ISPs largely don't compete. They're legalized regional monopolies. There was a single cable TV provider, and they became the single cable internet provider, and so they don't need to reduce prices or improve the service offering, at least not until an alternative competitor emerges.

One I'm willing to guess is the monopoly / duopoly of ISP providers in nearly all US neighborhoods means its less profitable to provide better service when there aren't alternatives to begin with

I've had the privilege to live for the last five years or so in locations with multiple options for ISP, each with a major cable provider and another ISP offering gigabit fiber to the home. Specifically, markets where both providers can offer high speed connections and you can realistically expect both to serve your residence.My experience is that even this minimal amount of competition absolutely cuts through the bullshit that you get from a monopoly provider.Classifying as utility c