Web is fenced

The past few weeks were frustrating.
For three weeks I didn't have an internet connection at home.
I know this sounds like a first world problem (and it is), but I'm addicted to the internet.
I would call it a first Ivan problem.

From one day to the next, the wired connection became unstable and extremely slow. Since there's no mobile signal where I live, I can't use a hotspot either.
After far too many useless calls, my provider finally agreed to send a technician to the street cabinet. He did find a failure and fixed it.
The whole experience left me with a nagging thought.

A lot of blogs in the indieweb write about self-hosting, owning your content, protecting privacy, quitting social media, and building a corner of the web that’s truly ours. But, in the end, this whole digital independence collapses without an ISP that "gives us permission" to pass through its cables.
We rely on them. We pay them. We’re tied to their infrastructure.
If they don’t let us in, we’re locked out.

As far as I know, there’s no way to be independent from them.
Surely, I can switch providers, or use a mobile operator. But I still have to pick a gatekeeper. A portal to access the internet. And all these portals are manned.

The web might feel borderless, but our access to it is fenced in.

This brief outage made me more aware of that invisible dependency. One that often goes unspoken in conversations about digital autonomy.
Without cables and permissions (and a technician with a screwdriver), the rest doesn't matter.