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This sounds suspiciously like the banking system
That helped a lot.
In effect, my ISP is selling me connections that no one would bother offering me on my own?
There's also the gatekeeper of IP space, specifically IP4 space, which is effectively digital real estate.
The internet is a fundamentally shitty designed. Gatekeepers and centralized organizers everywhere.
It's all just inherited from decades ago before people in western US universities and telephone networks of the past before we knew how big things would get. I can't blame them though, nobody can see the future. And the challenge was really really hard.
All freedom technologies like p2p torrenting, onion network, the lightning network etc. contain significant portions of workaround these constraints.
Somewhat simplistic explanation.
The internet is really just "peering agreements". So if you own some physical connection + own a routeable block of IPs you can enter into "peering agreements" with other similar entities and you broadcast how to route to your network and they do same. Then traffic flows.
But there is a caveat. If you are a new ISP then you must purchase your "transit" (upstream access) prior to anyone giving you a "peering agreement" that is because unless you have proven amount of traffic there is no worth to "peering" with you.
At the very top, a handful of “tier‑1” networks do not buy transit; they interconnect with each other purely via settlement‑free peering and collectively form what people colloquially call the “backbone.”