> The internet is a network. You are on the edge of the network. There's a gateway between you and the network.
Everything you have said above is wrong, and sounds like propaganda from Silicon Valley cloud computing cults:
- the Internet is a network of networks, not a single unified network
- you are not "on the edge" (this is only valid from a cloud vendor perspective): if the target audience for your services is in your neighborhood and your ISP is user-friendly, you are in fact "in the center" right where it matters and you can provide much better services to end-users than from a remote continent
- there's routers on your path on the network, but there's no gateway between you and the network: you may have a LAN with local addresses but that doesn't even have to be the case (you can have public IPv6 for everyone on your LAN), and if Google just happens to be next door to your house you can take your own cable to them (assuming they would let you) and do BGP with them directly from your home router (assuming you can configure it, and you get an AS number)
So i agree with you what you describe is typical in the centralized setups that Silicon Valley has pushed to (successfully) render our lives miserable, but there's no reason this has to be. People from non-profit ISPs such as NYCMesh or the FFDN federation certainly make sure we don't have to live in this perpetual nightmare.
> Switching ISP takes on the order of days instead of minutes.
Good point, but this is only because public-serving infrastructure have been cannibalized by corporations. It doesn't have to be this way, in the great scheme of things. Moreover, once you have a decent neutral ISP you usually never need to switch.