[phyrrus9]

I feel like there's a general lack of competition in the residential ISP market. Here, Quest (Century Link) owns and leases a vast majority of the infrastructure and offers service in only a handful of those. There a many residential areas that are limited to Comcast for wired options. The remaining options (satellite, wireless, whatever) can't compete with the broadband offerings from Comcast and Quest. I expect it's the same in other areas. My parents live in an extremely rural area and their only options are Verizon FIOS or Satellite.

People say the Internet market is competitive and lacks monopoly, but Comcast/Verizon/Cox/Time Warner have effective monopolies in a lot of regions.

They don't have effective monopolies, they have actual monopolies. That was something that was decided in the 1920s, and govt suspended antitrust rules for telecom