“Tunnel” under the streets is the verb cable workers and pols who award franchises use to discuss installing infrastructure.
I just told you, personal experience — a cable company was ousted because of customer dissatisfaction in my market in Southern California. Another company snapped it up the franchise instantly.
Please counter with an example of what you’re saying happens — a company gets kicked out of a major market and the franchise is left hanging. You won’t find one because cable companies scrap over any franchise available, even if they have to install new infrastructure. That is the verifiable history of cable TV in the US in the last 30 years.
Consumers have power in this economic arrangement — they just don’t know it.
Kick outs are too rare, there aren’t examples. The question really is how many times have city governments CONTEMPLATED kicking out the company only to do some looking around and finding out no other company wants to take on the effort. I know in the 90s the Tucson city council talked a big game about “forcing Cox to make changes or lose the access”, but nothing ever came from it and eventually they shut up.
Consumers know they have the power, but as I pointed out yesterday, they use the power in a way you don’t like. They use their power to make the cable companies cave to ever increasing rates from the channels. Bitching and moaning about something then actually working to keep it the same is a long standing American tradition. Well on display here, we gripe constantly about cable prices and cable business practices but whenever the cable companies hit the mattresses to hold rates down or change the business we complain they aren’t giving us our channels.