Eventually, someone with a very big boat comes along. This person states that anyone can fish from his boat. Everyone understands that fishing from his boat won't make them any more likely to catch a fish, so why should they fish from HIS boat?
I have to disagree with this part. You explain why:
The owner of the boat tells everyone that he is offering 2 important things for those that fish from his boat. First, there is some effort involved in the fishing process and he is willing to assist in that effort. He personally will monitor the hooks and bait them if they no longer have bait on them, he'll also personally reel in the fish if they bite, The fishers just have to provide and maintain the functionality of all the fishing equipment themselves.
-ck provides an important service, that is network connectivity to the rest of the network.
if you are solo mining from your garage and are using your google fiber internet connection to have your node broadcast any found blocks, if you find a block within x second(s) of a major pool finding a block, your block will likely get orphaned because the pools are very well connected amongst each other, and other pools (miners) are likely to have received (and accepted) a pool's block before ever seeing your block that would have to make its way through the network "organically". I would assume that -ck is running multiple, well-connected nodes, that is capable of quickly broadcasting any found block that someone using his service finds. Another service that -ck provides is ensuring that any block found is valid (more specifically that any miner using his service is mining for a valid block).
Instead of charging a fee to connect to his service, -ck charges on a commission-based model in which he charges a fee out of the block reward of any block found using his service.
I am not sure how large this advantage is, but for every 1 second more quickly that -ck's service is able to get your block to the rest of the miners is a 0.167% reduction in the chance that your block will get orphaned. Someone using -ck's service would receive a similar advantage on the other end too -- a miner using -ck's service is going to be looking for a block on top of the most recently found block more quickly when compared to a miner using his home internet connection to get the most recent block for similar reasons.