The problem with your later analogy is that there was minimal gating to opening a gas station if the local tack vendor started trying to extort the local popula

The problem with your later analogy is that there was minimal gating to opening a gas station if the local tack vendor started trying to extort the local populace to maintain a dying business model. That is why, usually, capitalism works in these situations - if the status quo is exploiting its customers, you can create a competitor because there is profit between the extortion and the break even. With ISPs, or any general infrastructure, it is a hugely inefficient usage of resources to duplicate the work - good analogies would be how dumb it would be to have multiple sewer systems, with only one attached to the house at a time, or multiple voltages of electric lines where only your choice electric company is hooked up. Fundamentally, it is that all and any future goods that require transport to the home over infrastructure need to be public services, and the maintainers be common carriers. Because creating the pipes (the water, the subway, the electric, the networking) are all prohibitively expensive to try to compete in, require deep intervention of states (which rarely doesn't result in market dilution) and are naturally a common good because unused bandwidth - in roads, in power line voltage, in pipe flow - are wasted potential, and duplicating the effort and having all the lost potential as a result can be, and is devastating to economies.