The reality RIGHT NOW is that their is no competition in 99% of the US. Ending Net Neutrality right now and hoping in a decade things change would be stupid.
We need more of that from more companies.
Perhaps a better solution is to government fund small ISP's (they exist, look for them) and help them develop their own infrastructure in major cities. It will not be an overnight solution no, but it's far better imo than permanent legislation that might just kill the innovation you seek to spur.
Look at the state of DSL. It's delivered over POTS lines and falls under the legislation governing said lines. If an ISP runs lines to provide DSL service, they are required to lease the lines to whoever wants them (other isp's) for cost (not much profit made from this transaction). Suddenly everyone abandoned DSL in favor of Fiber and Cable services, and we've seen speeds exponentially grow in this area.
POTS lines already exist to every home in the USA, why not use them? DSL2+ has greatly increased the speeds, but still few ISP's use it. It's because of the huge legislative hurdles they have to jump over just to provide the service (I have a friend who is a WISP in the bay area of CA, and this is the reason he gave me for why he's not currently also running DSL to homes in his service region).
We risk doing the same if we regulate all internet carrying lines.
I really think it's better to somehow grow a lot more ISP's that operate in great competition. I don't know the perfect solution or how to go about accomplishing this -- but I do know free competition almost always trumps legislation. What we don't have right now is free competition (we have monopolies/duopolies).
The thinking that government regulation is always bad is wrong. There is no reason why the government can't classify ISPs as public utilities AND help create more players.
Any solution would take time so what we can't do right now is allow Net Neutrality to end and make the situation worse.
I'll take Comcast's terrible pricing and service. Give me some of my taxes back. If me and a few buddies want to start an ISP then that's on us.
We can look at the cities Google Fiber has rolled out to. In every instance, competitor's pricing has decreased while bandwidth speed has increased. That is what we are fighting for -- we are not fighting for a government set bare-minimum level of service for government set price. That will get your DSL-like service -- just barely "good enough" and no innovation because there's no real competition.
We need to somehow get to having 6-10 ISP's in every major city. This will drive quality of service up, and pricing down.
I also think it's a conflict of interest to be a content provider while also an ISP (comcast, time-warner, etc). Either deliver bits, or create the bits -- not both.