ISPs are natural monopolies [1]. In the US we're seeing increasing market share concentration by some pretty big juggernauts in the space (Comcast, Verizon). So what you're seeing is a lack of ISP choices for consumers and in many instances only 1 choice and that in my opinion is far more problematic than what Google and FB are doing. I'm not defending censorship by any party here really, but I definitely think censorship at the ISP level is a much bigger problem.
I read that wikipedia page. I'd say I have more choice with ISPs than with search engines. Won't you say 'natural monopoly' applies to google too at this point?
The "top tier" has three options that are all basically equivalent in terms of quality:
google.com
bing.com
baidu.com
Other less popular but in many cases still excellent options include:
yandex.com
gigablast.com
lycos.com
askjeeves.com
duckduckgo.com
qwant.com
And the list goes on and on and on... these are just the "similar to google" search engines. There are also search engines for particular topics, search engines that take a different paradigm ("semantic search"), and with beer money you can even buy search engine+crawler software packages and build your own search engine for the portion of the web you care about.
And major sites like Wikipedia and Amazon and all the social sites have their own search features so you don't even need a third party search engine within most of the big silos.
If you're using google it's because either a) you want to use google; or b) you're monumentally lazy. Not because there aren't other options.
You can also write your own crawler and search engine. In fact, as literally all of these options demonstrate, with a surprisingly small amount of VC cash you could build your own "more than good enough" search engine. The same amount of cash probably wouldn't be nearly enough to build out a Verizon or Comcast competitor in even one city.
Conversely, I have exactly 3 options for ISPs in my area. One of them is the local equivalent of "build your own search engine" (and about similar quality). So actually 2 options -- Comcast and Verizon. There is no long tail of other providers, and what's more, there almost certainly never will be because acquiring the land rights would be enormously expensive. Oh and BTW I live in a major city; outside of cities you're even more screwed.
And even if we just limit ourselves to the "big best in class" search engines -- google, bing, baidu, duckduckgo -- that's still twice the number of options that most people have for ISP in the US.
I can get 50-100++Mbps from Comcast, or 1Mbps (maybe) from CenturyLink, and then... no actually that's it. And 1Mbps would not let me do a lot of stuff online anymore.
So effectively I have no choice, unless I want to stop all video watching, downloading games regularly (not gonna soak 18 hours of 100% of my bandwidth to download a new title), etc.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly