What is happening is that they pull to a city, and offer attractive deals, as soon as they do companies like Time Warner will adapt and match their price and speed, but only in the region that Google get, every other customer in another region is still being f*cked as usual.

The regional ISPs can actually provide service even at a loss, because they are available in different regions so they can use money from other regions to subsidize losses in the specific one they want to eliminate the competition.

I think at this point best deal for us is if a cities would start providing ISP services, and some are trying to do just that, but unfortunately existing ISPs fighting tooth and nail with this by suing every city that is trying to do that.

So, no, nothing can easily replace existing ISPs and they know it. Currently a lot of regulation is needed because there's no competition possible, otherwise ISPs are free to do whatever they want, because who you're going to switch to if you're fed up with them?

If Google is smart they'll double-down on Google Fiber. If the rest of SV were smart they'd chip in and blanket the top 200 cities with gigabit fiber to kickstart some real competition.

Ma Bell looks back at the days of $5/minute long distance calls with great fondness. The internet is an asset to be monitized to the maximum extent possible.

Google owns/operates one of the largest, possibly the largest network in the world. It's called YouTube. (All the other traffic also rides it, but YT is the major app by volume.)

Google also is an ISP, in the form of Google Fiber.

Google also is a (virtual) wireless carrier, as Google Fi.