> But I have more realistic choices for say my cell phone plan than I do the search engine I use. And I have every little choice in, e.g., whether or not I send emails to gmail/yahoo/etc. users.
If I don't want to use Google because of their tracking, I can use DuckDuckGo.
If I don't want to use Comcast because of their tracking, my other options are Comcast, Comcast, Comcast, and Comcast. I think you're being a bit disingenuous by focusing on cellular carriers and not mentioning wired broadband providers where we have no competition, no consumer choice, and no market solution to abuses by the service provider.
Your criticism of email is somewhat more fair. While there are alternative services available that you could use, the majority of your contacts are going to choose to fork over all of your information to Google. But if you're really concerned about that, you can find other channels to contact them. That's still a better situation than the ISP market that most Americans are stuck with.
Trotting out DDG and Yahoo is kinda like saying satellite and fixed 4G are competition in almost every market. In practice, nobody sees them as real competition. In practice, the markets look quite similar:
Also, I am skeptical of this focus on wireline. There are 3x as many wireless broadband subscriptions in the U.S. (more than there are people!) than wired broadband. Wired broadband penetration has actually plateaued and is now shrinking.
I don't know about your comparison. Scientifically speaking Google search results and Bing's are nearly identical. And this is born out in the fact that Google's cost of acquiring traffic is going up while their ad CPMs on search are going down. They've been disguising it by increasing ad units on the search pages, oftentimes breaking their own ad placement guidelines. That Google's search is commoditized is the entire reason why Google became Alphabet and has been cleaning house on all their frivolous products. To be clear, Bing doesn't have the brand Google has, but in terms of the actual technical result of the product, it is virtually identical. The other issue with your comparison as approached above, is that comcast and the other ISPs have gov't granted monopolies, and end users cannot move to another carrier. They were granted these in exchange for building out massive cable/broadband networks with hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars. What happened is that the regulators fell asleep at the wheel or turned a blind eye and almost none of that money was actually spent upgrading the network.
How are those numbers figured? If you have a family of four living in a house (alternately, college students or professionals sharing an apartment), I'd assume you're counting that as 4 wireless broadband subscriptions? Or if you're talking about adults working jobs with business numbers, maybe 6? Regardless, it would be a lot more meaningful to look at whether a given person has access to a wired connection at home, instead of an apples and oranges count of subscription numbers.
If I had to guess about data consumed, that single wired connection probably handles more data than four mobile plans put together, thanks to mobile data caps and Netflix.
As far as broadband having "plateaued," it's not too surprising that something with a theoretical cap of 100% penetration would eventually stop growing. There are only so many houses to connect.
I don't have any particular problem with mobile broadband, my LTE connection on T-Mobile is actually faster than my cable. But there are a lot of people who use more than a couple of gigs a month, so cable isn't going away any time soon. And in the meantime, I'm not thrilled with Comcast having free reign to do whatever they want just because "the market will solve everything." It won't.
EDIT: At 20 Mb/s, it'd take me about half an hour to burn through my entire month's 5GB data allowance
I'll just note that you framed it very narrowly as "wired broadband" so the argument works; someone who takes the opposing view might consider dialup, 4g, satellite, or other services to be competition you could switch to. They likely have more market share than DuckDuckGo compared to Google/Bing.
I guess my criteria is "things I can binge Netflix on." Neither dialup or 4G fits the bill due to low speed or small data caps.
Gaming is a slightly smaller niche that rules out satellite on account of the >0.5 second latency.
And that "niche" is still enormous. With very few exceptions, every person playing any realtime online games from an Xbox, PlayStation, other console, or PC is doing it over a wired broadband connection and can't consider other services to switch to.
If I don't want to use Google because of their tracking, I can use DuckDuckGo.
If I don't want to use Comcast because of their tracking, my other options are Comcast, Comcast, Comcast, and Comcast. I think you're being a bit disingenuous by focusing on cellular carriers and not mentioning wired broadband providers where we have no competition, no consumer choice, and no market solution to abuses by the service provider.
Your criticism of email is somewhat more fair. While there are alternative services available that you could use, the majority of your contacts are going to choose to fork over all of your information to Google. But if you're really concerned about that, you can find other channels to contact them. That's still a better situation than the ISP market that most Americans are stuck with.