The provider you cannot leave

In a new residential complex in 6th of October, there is one internet provider, and you cannot choose another.

It was presented as a benefit. The cables were laid before anyone moved in, the first months came free, and the setup was done for you. One company, one bill, nothing to think about.

A few years on, the connection is slow most evenings, and complaining changes nothing, because the company knows exactly where you will be next month. Here. With them.

Lock-in tends to last. That is why anyone who holds power values it so much. It is easier to run something when nobody can walk away and no objection has to be answered.

The alternative feels messier. When customers can leave, they do. When they can complain in public, they will. Every provider in an open market spends time and money keeping people who are free to go. It looks wasteful.

But that freedom is what keeps the arrangement honest. Each person who leaves, or threatens to, or writes a sharp review, is a small correction. Added together, those corrections are how a service improves without anyone ordering it to.

So the closed offer nearly always arrives with a sweetener: the free months, the bundled extras, the promise that everything will simply work.

Sometimes it does, for a while. Then something shifts, a better way appears elsewhere, and the closed arrangement is the last to bend, because nothing inside it was ever made to.