As a person residing in France, that's alien to me. We've had government regulations for ISP choice for almost two decades now. I'm very critical of them because they're actually not enforced (still very hard/impossible for smaller non-profit ISPs to use big corp fiber despite the law saying so), but at least they enable me to choose whatever xDSL provider i'd like, or even start my own for somewhat-reasonable prices.

I feel bad for you. Comcast recently accidentally disconnected my service twice now 2 weeks before my move because their internal systems are screwed up and then told me they couldn't fix their own issues because of their system, thus leaving me without Internet for multiple days.