> There's a flip side to this: in part thanks to this lack of regulation, anything outside the popular protocols tend to be blocked in an increasing number of network.

That is definitely not the result of a lack of regulation. The networks doing that are predominantly not public networks like Comcast, they're private internal corporate networks. The issue is they're a large enough minority that they can't be ignored. But that can't be fixed with regulation of public networks.

In fact, it's caused by certain regulations and pseudo-regulations like PCI-DSS, which require the default-deny policies you're referring to.