I have a sinking feeling that all this will result in is a situation where monopolies are given out to the existing players and no one is forced to do anything to upgrade the existing service.
It's naive to think it would be anything but this. We like the Internet as it is today but for some reason we need to have the FCC control it in order to try to keep it the way it is.
Except we don't like the Internet we have today, where net neutrality is always teetering on an edge into an abyss of sponsored channels and provider blocking on a whim.
That, and we don't like how the major telecoms exploit us all for huge profits off the backs of decade old taxpayer funded infrastructure they got through political manipulation and now sit on for free money.
The golden age of Internet access was in the late 90s, when over-twisted pair dialup was still a thing but the regulations meant the wire runners had to license it out at fair rates, so you would get a hundred ISPs offering you service for dollars a month. But that could never scale, and we ended up with DSL and Cable Internet without any of that open market aspect where we are all taken advantage of for corporate profit.
That is not to say that Title II is anything good. It does not solve the central problem that ISPs have no incentive to improve the networks, all it does is compel fixed rate competition, which is only good for keeping us exactly where we are, when the technologies already exist to give us so much better.
Thats a seriously loaded question. The problem is the US is a really big place so in city's and their metro areas you get world class speeds ( 150Mbs is pretty common ) however in rural areas your stuck with maybe DSL and if not that then you can get satellite internet.
Thats the problem I see with classifying ISP's as a common carrier. Your not going to get 150Mbs everywhere your going to get 10 which means in the urban area's where you do have good access and some competition you will see stagnation ( forget 1Gbps in cities that are well above the average )
We like the way it is (or rather, the way it was 15 years ago), but the cat appears to be out of the bag. Comcast, Verizon, et. al. all have giant dying industries to support on the backs of our Internet access fees, and they are going to extract every penny of value from their local and regional monopolies.
I don't especially want the government involved, but doing nothing is not going to maintain the status quo. Destroying local monopolies that have sway over a global network is a much better move in my opinion.
It's naive to think it would be anything but this. We like the Internet as it is today but for some reason we need to have the FCC control it in order to try to keep it the way it is.