It's a legitimate point, though, not mere Whataboutism. The Big Tech companies like Google have been a counter-weight to big Telecom (things like Google Fiber, Google Fi). To go after Big Tech without also going after Big Telecom is to reinforce the market power of Big Telecom.
Weren't Google Fiber and Google Fi just tests, not actual large scale investments? I mean, in that case, there are many counter-weights to Google - they just have 0% market share...
I don't believe that Big Tech has or wants to be anything to counter the ISP monopolies. Sure, they don't want to pay for traffic twice, but that's about it - if net neutrality wasn't an issue, Google, FB & Co wouldn't care about telecom monopolies one bit. In fact, I'm pretty sure they'd prefer a single large ISP that they can make data deals with to get a better tracking system up and running.
I think Big Tech care about internet access (=more customers and/or more people to advertise to), so the extent to which Big Telecom has poor access in rural areas, it's in Big Tech's interests to offer some alternative.
...but perhaps you're right that beyond that, they don't really care if there's just one choice in major ISP in much of the US. At least, the incentive to care is not as strong.
> Nobody wants to be beholden to a single provider -- that's incredibly dangerous for a tech company.
Eh, sure, but Google likes to make one big deal with Master Card to buy your cc transactions, they don't want to make a thousand deals with small local banks.
As for Fiber & Fi, it looked to me as if Google was checking to see if they could easily and cheaply "disrupt" those markets. They saw that they could not and cut their losses.
> If the only CC provider was Mastercard then no deal would be had for Google.
Why not? It's bonus money for MC, why wouldn't they be happy to sell Google access to your transaction data? They don't have to do anything but copy the data and hold their hands out for millions and millions of dollars. Why in the world wouldn't they make that deal? Privacy concerns? I have my doubts.
