And I think this is perfectly acceptable when the service in question is one out of many. The reason why it is so contentious today is that a few megacorps have effectively come to define what "the Internet" is for the majority of people, though, and their ability to exclude content translates to extreme amount of political power in practice - so much so that it should not be tolerated in a free society.

But the solution to this problem is not to force those private service providers to be hands-off, but to make sure that none of them are big enough that it matters. Which the political forces that are pushing for these laws won't do, because their political economy boils down to "capitalism good, anti-monopoly bad", and that inevitably leads to the present state of affairs in practice.