Supermarkets don't have government price controls, and they also have very little government intervention. Yet I assume you don't worry about "back room extortion rackets" occurring with the pricing there.
This is because there is a healthy amount of competition with supermarkets, something the ISP market lacks.
Again, it comes down to lowering barriers of entry for new ISPs, rather than falsely labeling all network traffic the same, and pretending that solves a problem.
It’s simply unrealistic that the barriers to entry for new ISPs will be low enough any time soon for the free market to sort this out. There are many different reasons for this including:
1. Very, very high costs to get started
2. Exclusive agreements that buildings have with a particular ISP already
3. Many regulations that would prohibit laying new broadband connections to every house, e.g. because there are already houses and streets in the way
4. Economies of scale that prevent small ISPs from being profitable
5. Competition from megacorps that can treat broadband as a loss leader (or low margin side business) to get customers for their other services such as cable TV, landline telephone, or video streaming
6. Difficulty competing with much larger competitors since they would generally be offering a nearly identical commodity service without the advertising budget or brand recognition
7. Larger competitors actively lobbying against new rules that would devalue their investments
You might be able to find a way around some of them (like #7) but most of those issues are basically intractable given the current technology.
Imagine if a new company wanted to run cables to your building in a crowded city each month. You’d have to keep tearing up the roads and other infrastructure to make improvements and you’d have tons of essentially duplicated cables. You’d basically want to push for laws that required shared access to the cables to eliminate redundancy which leads quickly to either the government owning the cables and leasing them out (quite a good option in my view) or a major ISP like Comcast owning the cables and leasing them out.
Don’t get me wrong, governments should incentivize way more competition among ISPs. But we aren’t even close to it being an industry with low barriers of entry. Until we have better wireless technologies, we are probably stuck burying fiber which Google has shown is enormously expensive.
They don’t have price controls, but they do have sanitation standards, quality of goods laws, food standards legislation and mandatory returns requirements and restrictions on misleading pricing.
If you don’t like the price at a Supermarket you can usually drive 5 minutes to the next store, but changing ISPs can take weeks and you’re locked into long contracts.
Maybe if we can lower the barriers to entry and give people a genuine choice of ISPs first. That would be the equivalent of talking to the customer about special deals for certain content and giving the customer the power to choose. Do that, then we can talk. Wiping out net neutrality without a genuine choice for consumers is a blatant stitch up.
This is because there is a healthy amount of competition with supermarkets, something the ISP market lacks.
Again, it comes down to lowering barriers of entry for new ISPs, rather than falsely labeling all network traffic the same, and pretending that solves a problem.