I'm sorry - did you not see the recent election where the Republican candidate ran on a platform of forcing 12m people to "self-deport"?
2,044 karma · joined March 14, 2012
Evolution - that is, assumptions that are accurate are favoured since they are more likely to lead to the animal surviving, vs embracing spurious correlations which are likely to get you killed.
Of course, this can break down if we try to apply the cognitive rules of thumb we've evolved to new domains outside our original evolutionary scope - our difficulties in thinking about statistics and probability are a great example of this. The math is trivial, but it just doesn't fit our brains very well without a great deal of cultural scaffolding.
You're also an exception, and if the cable company tried to optimise for you (today) they would lose much much more than they would gain.
See: http://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-run-an-ab-test.html
Once a regional agglomeration like this is established, it's hard for someone else to match (just like it's hard to set up a new Facebook).
And, also, once such a hub is established, people of course look for reasons to explain why it won. Mostly they're hagiographic "just-so" stories, of no real benefit to anyone looking to replicate it.