The situation isn't comparable to social media unicorns courting acquisition at all. Comcast and the other big incumbents have one very clear overt objective:

The situation isn't comparable to social media unicorns courting acquisition at all. Comcast and the other big incumbents have one very clear overt objective: own the customer base for the foreseeable future. If you're a small independent ISP and try to go up against them, as soon as you're on their radar you can expect a pretty ruthless attack. The most mild form of this is Comcast's sales team is willing to offer something closer to fair pricing to condo properties if it involves ~5 years lockin vs a new competitor. A friend owns a business in this space and has watched a couple competitors that were growing fast locally suddenly find their entire customer base gone within weeks via this. Less fortunate people find themselves facing a legal challenge at the city or state level. And that's not even getting into what happens if your small ISP competitor gets going well enough to start talking to the city about renting space on utility poles or doing some trenching. These mega ISPs aren't interested in acquiring competition for the last mile. They want to pre-empt competition existing entirely, and they can and will use every single tool available to them in doing so.