I could go back into the history of the telecommunications monopoly in the US but that hardly seems relevant to the modern Internet.
I could go back into the history of the telecommunications monopoly in the US but that hardly seems relevant to the modern Internet.
More than fair point.
That said, there's a long history of entrenched incumbents exerting anticompetitive pressures against new entrants. AT&T itself was founded in part out of spite against the telegraph monopolies, who opposed it. I've pointed to Bernard Stern's 1937 article "Resistances to the Adoption of Technological Innovations" several times on HN: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20532443>. The markdown may now be found at <https://rentry.co/szi3g>.
The ISP situation is somewhat different, though if you look at early dial-up providers (Prodigy, AOL, CompuServ, and MCI Mail), those were generally and quite unambiguously aimed at creating captive markets. They differed from the more open general ISPs such as Earthlink, Mindspring, The World, SonicNet, etc., who largely offered protocols-based access (straight TCP/IP, SMTP/email, FTP/HTTP file/content access, IRC, and the like. Those have largely been subsumed by telco oligopoly providers, e.g., the new AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon in the US.
I don't know to what extent there was or wasn't overt resistance to expanded Internet services, though the US's general lagging on widespread and high-speed broadband provision relative to global peers remains an issue. It was a significant talking point during the COVID-19 lockdowns when much in-person interaction switched to videoconferencing, a functionality still poorly supported by much of the population's Internet service.