Most "free" markets don't have perfect competition, nor perfect information, nor rational actors. It's possible for Microsoft to provide a terrible service and for no better competitors to emerge.
Consider last-mile telephone lines. It's wasteful to have ten companies each spend billions of dollars digging up the same roads to lay the same cables - and it's a nearly-impossible barrier to entry for new competitors. Sure, anything is possible with "sufficient capital", but fundamentally it's an inefficient waste of time and investor money to recreate a service that already exists, and the investors will be correspondingly scarce.
Most countries have enacted legislation enforcing fairly shared use of such lines (breaking up monopolies in the process) because cooperation is fundamentally more efficient than competition as effort is not wasted in duplication.
As a result, the ISP/telco market in civilized countries has since escaped from that stagnant local maxima with its high barrier-of-entry, to a more agile, more competitive state where smaller players have a fair chance of competing. I'm not sure if this includes the USA though (c.f. Comcast/TWC merger complaints, single-ISP areas, the "Worst company in america" award, unending complaints on /r/technology &c).
There's an easy solution to the last-mile problem, which is for communities to own the infrastructure and operate it as a non-profit.
Believe me, people would do that if they were getting sufficiently screwed by telcos and if it were legal.
Actually, the former condition is already satisfied, but the latter is (basically) not.
Though there have been lots of municipal broadband efforts, which is a point in my favor, here. The telcos fight them tooth and nail using the legal system.
That is just another example of a legal monopoly (as opposed to a natural monopoly---no such thing).
The solution is for the lines to be operated prioritizing the community before profit, yes. We've agreed on the fundamentals but now differ in imagination of the size of the community.
Why not extend such egality to all citizens? And why do people have to get "screwed by telcos" first before it can happen?
Consider last-mile telephone lines. It's wasteful to have ten companies each spend billions of dollars digging up the same roads to lay the same cables - and it's a nearly-impossible barrier to entry for new competitors. Sure, anything is possible with "sufficient capital", but fundamentally it's an inefficient waste of time and investor money to recreate a service that already exists, and the investors will be correspondingly scarce.
Most countries have enacted legislation enforcing fairly shared use of such lines (breaking up monopolies in the process) because cooperation is fundamentally more efficient than competition as effort is not wasted in duplication.
As a result, the ISP/telco market in civilized countries has since escaped from that stagnant local maxima with its high barrier-of-entry, to a more agile, more competitive state where smaller players have a fair chance of competing. I'm not sure if this includes the USA though (c.f. Comcast/TWC merger complaints, single-ISP areas, the "Worst company in america" award, unending complaints on /r/technology &c).