Comcast is not a defacto monopoly because it is an ISP, it is because it started that way as a cable television provider, and the ISP service is carried on the same hardware. Ditto for the telco ISPs.
Bingo. And that is the real underlying problem.
You're mixing the different parts of the business together.
I'm not mixing them together. The local government and PSC is mixing them together. :-( I want to fix that problem too.
A franchise is not a monopoly unless it is explicitly made that way.
True, but that is what they are doing. :-( I hear you when you say "They aren't a monopoly, they are just a franchise! There could be other franchises!" The problem is the governments only grant one franchise license because they don't want more than one group building out infrastructure. (A similar thing happens with electric utilities.) There is a fix for this, but there is political pressure in the way... we will get to that in the end.
It is tough to compete with any larger provider. That's life. Mom and Pop grocery stores have a problem competing with the large chains, even if the chain is only a dozen stores.
It's not like that. Imagine if the chain grocery store owned the roads that lead to the stores. That is more or less what happens here. For example, I have lived in Baltimore City and the suburbs, and I chose to use Cavalier Telephone (AKA "CavTel") as my DSL provider. CavTel, like almost every other ISP that was not a franchise monopoly, is out of business. Why did they all die out?
The law requires that Verizon (the local telecom franchise monopoly) must lease their lines to CavTel. But wait... is Verizon really going to want a company competing with them? Is legally forcing them to allow competition going to really work? Well, it didn't. One reason was price. The law allowed Verizon to do lease lines to CavTel so at the same rate they offered DSL+ISP services to me. So that makes Cavtel more expensive right away. CavTel couldn't t service the lines themselves. Just like me, they had to call Verizon. And what are the odds that Verizon is going to provide CavTel good response time when CavTel is competing with them? There were lots of other problems, which is why most of those those ISPs were either bought-out or went out of business.
That is ultimately the problem, it is why your point about ISPs is valid. Those two parts should not be mixed, and thus the FCC should not need to pass Network Neutrality rules. Instead, we should bust the monopolies, split them ISPs out from the cable/telecom franchise monopolies, and life will be good.
Is Alamo somehow different?
Let me Google that for you. Alamo is neither a cable television nor telephone provider. It is a broadband internet service.
Exactly, Alamo is no different. That's what I was trying to say. Sorry for being unclear. They are the same as CavTel was. They must be licensing lines from a local telecom. Good luck with that, everybody else who tries that dies off. Let's dig into that:
Your only options are to use VPN, or lease lines from the local telephone monopoly.
Whose only option? The ISP? Yes, the ISP has to pay for it's connection to the Internet. The customer? No, there are other options. In fact, Alamo Broadband is a perfect example of one.
Again, sorry for the confusion. We are missing each other here. By "VPN" I meant an ISP who offers service to anyone over VPN. There are very few of them (Earthlink?) and that's not what Alamo is so nevermind that direction.
So yes, the ISP has to pay for it's connection to the Internet, just like the telecom or cable company. But if they are not a telecom/cable company, then they need some indirect way to get to the customer. When they lease lines from the telephone company, we often call that DSL. But that lease is where it turns into the funky regulatory situation I described above. If they do that, they are at the mercy of the telephone company who will try to find ways to push them out of business.
You mean where the FCC net neutrality rules apply to ISPs and not just cable TV or telco operations?
No, that isn't what I meant. Sorry for being unclear. I meant "Is Alamo somwhere that the regulatory structure is different from what I described above?"
Ultimately, the story of the late 90s and early 2000s is that almost every "ISP" who was not a telephone company or a cable company died. The solution to this is to do as you seem to be suggesting: Have ISPs that are not franchise monopolies. But for those ISPs to succeed, we must also bar the franchise monopolies from being ISPs. They need to go back to what they were around 1995: telecom infrastructure providers. Then the customer will use those lines along with PPP or PPPoE to connect to an ISP. That is why we had thousands of ISPs back then. The phone companies weren't getting trying to be ISPs as well, and getting in the way.
Go ahead and support Alamo the same way I supported Cavtel. I hope they survive. It would be really fun to chat about this some time with someone who knows the scenario. I'm not hard to find. Call me. :-)
