It’s a thing, it’s just run by the same companies, so you’re stuck with them either way.
Are you saying you have to pay those companies for access to satellite TV? In Germany it’s completely free, except for the cost of buying and setting up a satellite dish of course.
And ISPs here aren’t exclusively cable TV companies. Internet over coax cable does exist, but since there is competition from DSL and Fiber ISPs it’s actually priced very competivitely
I don’t know of any satellite company in the U.S. that does free service, used to be able to hijack a signal back in the day with some sketchy equipment but that’s basically not a common thing anymore. We do have free broadcasting with a digital receiver they switched over from analog a little over a decade ago (info). At the time they gave out free receivers since most tv’s weren’t compatible so a lot of people just never made the switch. Real shame too because they added a lot of channels with the change and I thoroughly enjoyed the upgrade (each channel got sub-channels as well so there was a lot more airing/to choose from).
