> This wasn't the case in the 90s, and had Hacker News existed back then ISP startups would have appeared frequently. Indeed. The late 90s / early 2000s were t

> This wasn't the case in the 90s, and had Hacker News existed back then ISP startups would have appeared frequently. Indeed. The late 90s / early 2000s were the golden age of the CLEC. There were certainly pain points (like getting copper pairs provisioned), but I remember not caring that my building didn't support Comcast Internet because I had an SDSL connection from Telocity and an ADSL connection from Speakeasy.