It's never clear to me what people even mean by this - it seems like a fashionable phrase to throw around. So I second your question - what practically speaking would happen under this scenario? I'd prefer to hear the people advocating it be explicit about what they want and why.
If you live in a major city in the US or Europe, your utilities almost certainly "just work," and this narrative is pure ideological bullshit based in fantasy.
Have you ever lived anywhere where utilities are not state-regulated? Are you comparing them to that experience?
You don't have to--you can just compare something that should be a utility (Comcast) with something that is (your power company). Hey, look! Turns out those government regulations help.
FWIW, in my perfect imaginary world, Google Search would work as it had worked few years ago (back when it had less ads), while social networks like Facebook would be forced to interoperate through some shared protocols. But then again, my vision of the perfect Internet involves significantly reducing control the publishing parties have - that is, those parties should publish content and services, not dictate the way I should consume said content and services. I should be perfectly free to render any site any way I like, including not rendering it at all, but navigating through my own (or third party) software.
I think this strikes at the heart of my contempt for heavy handed approach to regulation.
I kinda want to take that back and say we shouldn’t be having this conversation at all. This narrative that everything needs to be regulated and the Internet is a something makes me more worried that we’ll be required to do things as much as we’ll be protected in doing other things.
E.g. a relationship between the government and Facebook in any fashion pushes us closer to allowing Facebook as some form of shared trust - perhaps making it an eligible Voting ID. We get to a point where it becomes more hassle than it’s worth, benefiting the Gov and FB, but not really benefiting the end user.
Maybe that’s the real Net-Neutrality: keeping a hands-off relationship between how I consume information and the regulation of such.
Yes, I feel like the regulatory movement is underway, and the narrative is beginning to brew. And, I think we’re having someone else’s conversation.
It'd allow you to basically build your own Facebook app, migrate meaningfully to another service and build other services that meaningfully integrate with Facebook... and effectively turn FB/Twitter into public utilies and enable real competition to Google to appear by allowing users to share key data such as which result they clicked on in response to which query.
I actually prefer they not be regulated as public utilities because at least this way you have some measure of opting out of having information collected about you.