I understand the reality, I was trying to make an abstract example. Agreed though, lack of competition hurts consumers.
I would be 100% behind any politician who suggested ending cable company monopolies and providing alternatives, but it's not on the agenda.
Even better than competition, it'd be nice if there was a way to support cooperation. The Internet was built on cooperation with only the loosest of rules, certainly no central governing body. This post dotcom bubble consolidation of power seems unnecessary, but it always happens with this cycle of cheap money and bad investments.
What if Net Neutrality made it possible for anyone to resell their internet service with no repercussions? I'm sure that there's a lot of people who live in densely populated areas who wouldn't mind sharing their bandwidth with their neighbors for 1/2 the cost, but currently that's not a practical choice.
It seems like people in government are mystified by the Internet (and cars, guns, rock and roll, open pits, really everything). I haven't seen any evidence that they really understand that there is no central control yet.
About filtering:
I'm quite technical, so I suppose I'd use Tor or similar or that free VPNish browser plugin (I don't recall the name) or similar. But really this only helps with censorship. The key thing here from my perspective is that ISPs absolutely do not want to filter or censor anything. They just want to get people to sign year long contracts and continuously pay their bills and not break anything. Filtering or censorship is an additional cost (large cost actually).
I haven't really been following all of the Net Neutrality stuff, but I am curious since people keep saying "services like Netflix can't be throttled or blocked," what about "services" like BitTorrent or Tor or SILC (or Gale those are nearly defunct, but still). If the FCC wants to protect everyone's access to Tor, then that's really good, but I just don't expect anyone in government to understand it beyond "it's used for cryptocurrency drug sales and kiddie porn."
I suspect that Tor is totally broken at this point.
About phones:
In actuality, what I did in the choice of mobile carrier was to go with T-Mobile. I actually tried their $35/mo prepaid service for a while (this was a huge savings switching from Sprint). It was inconvenient, so after a month I switched to their $50/mo prepaid service with all kinds of unlimited stuff (minutes, bandwidth, etc).
One of the primary reasons that T-Mobile won me over is because I can decide to switch to any other GSM based carrier (there's a few that resell T-Mobile, like Straight Talk, and there's AT&T). I'll probably have mobile phone service "forever", but I'll never be in contract again if I can avoid it.