The Internet is the product of several economic effects, which explain all your points: * The cost to enter the market is effectively nothing. * The opportuni

The Internet is the product of several economic effects, which explain all your points: * The cost to enter the market is effectively nothing. * The opportunity cost to switch new services is, again, nothing (change the URL). * The opportunity cost to switch established services is not nothing (network effects, all friends are on Facebook, etc). * The cost to acquire network effects is not nothing. The later effects have nothing to do with the Internet. In any economy where window shopping options is free and competing is free, then whoever owns the collective opinion on your product domain is going to get a winner take all situation. Capitalism in general is like this - the more of a market you control, the more easily you can displace the competition through your own influence. That is why you get many natural monopolies. Consumers expect web based content to be free because the marginal costs of their usage is effectively nothing (the per-user costs of running a server with a billion users requires many zeroes). Websites, and digital information in general, are non-scarce resources. Once made, making copies costs nothing. That is a much bigger rabbit hole though, and is generalized into broader problems of cognitive dissonance in people trying to put scarcity into non-scarce resources. The only way to make the Internet - or more specifically, tcp/ip and http - more small guy friendly is to promote browsers to make content discovery easier at the browser level. Otherwise people will go to the silos they are familiar with / the ones they are told about. Google et al fight for net neutrality because getting rid of it only makes ISPs richer at the cost of consumers and website hosts. The only possible state of being without net neutrality is paid bribes for service - Comcast will demand huge sums of money from Google et al or will throttle their services so their customers stop using them and use their own in-home products instead. And given the opportunity ISPs won't be some charity giving small business free rides - they will slow down or cripple the Internet for everyone except those who pay. The customers Google wants are a captive audience of major ISPs - without competition in the ISP market, and without net neutrality, every website operator needs to prostate themselves to the demands of ISPs to have their websites reach their audience, and the customers have no say in that relationship because they don't have a choice in ISP.