What I don't understand is how exactly ISPs managed to be declared not utilities.
Does no-one remember the really old acoustic coupled modems where you had to literally pick up the phone (utility) and place it on the receiver? All that happened was that we started plugging the phone line directly into an integrated modem - it's still going down the phone line for most people.
An ISP is a telecoms provider and should technically already be regulated as one...
ISPs ran on top of telecom service, which itself ran on telecom infrastructure, not that differently than any business that received phone calls, except it utilized telecom more heavily.
Later, with DSL, service was provided over the same infrastructure telecom used, blurring the line a bit. Additionally, by this point, the internet was becoming more important to daily life.
Now, we have telecom and other services offered on top of the network service which is provided on infrastructure designed for networks, not telecom.
So I would say, yes, an ISP is a telecoms provider, but they didn't really start that way.
Edit: I'm being sort of loose with "telecom" here. I'm using more in the "what we regulate" sense than the "what the word means" sense.
I don't even think telecom is ambiguous or used loosely in this regard; comcast provides telephone service, and "telecom", short for "telecommunications", is defined as "communication over a distance by cable, telegraph, telephone, or broadcasting."
I'm pretty sure telephone lines are indeed today regulated as utilities. That's why I can get DSL service from a company other than Verizon, even though Verizon owns all the phone lines in my neighborhood.
No one ever put the phone modem on cable networks, though, or fiber optics, or wireless. None of those are regulated as utilities, so the only service providers on those lines are the companies who own the lines. This is a big reason Verizon has sunk almost all of their recent investment into FiOS and wireless.
It's not really that simple - try to remember how cable companies started. The basic idea is that if you lived in a remote area and the TV signal was blocked by mountains, you and a bunch of your neighbors would build a tower up on a ridge with an antenna and some signal boosting equipment. Then along came satellite TV (think 6m dishes, not DirecTV), so instead of a terrestrial antenna, the coax cables hooked up to a satellite dish.
This is pretty much how cable worked until the mid-90s: cable wasn't much more than a way to broadcast satellite video content using hardware that was tunable by consumer TVs. Cities had been granting exclusive licenses for years and nobody thought much of it. Regulation was unnecessary because the market was so heavily fragmented, and even the huge players didn't serve more than a few hundred thousand homes. Since satellite dishes were relatively cheap and needed to be placed in every market, there was no benefit from economies of scale, and thus no market pressure to consolidate.
Enter DOCSIS. Cable companies figured out they could sell bidirectional 10mbps Internet connections with very few modifications to their infrastructure by utilizing unused frequency bands along with signal compression and encryption. This was in the days before ADSL, and most customers were on 56k dialup, so it was a big leap. ADSL was already obsolete by the time it was widely available, and cost the telcos significantly more to deploy than DOCSIS did for the cable companies. DOCSIS adoption happened very fast - and it was a lot cheaper to deploy DOCSIS if you had already done it before.
Internet access DOES benefit from economies of scale since terrestrial connections are far faster than satellite ones, and can be aggregated to take advantage of time sharing effects. Therefore it made sense to start connecting the various cable systems across the country, and massive consolidation happened faster than the regulators were able to react. Add in a dash of the deregulatory fever that started in the late 90s under Clinton and continued under Bush, and you have a recipe for hands-off regulation of an industry that didn't need regulation only a few years prior. Nevermind the FCC was so preoccupied with sorting out the ILEC/CLEC mess that they totally missed cable sneaking in the back door of their outdated regulatory framework.
Anyway, regardless of how you feel about the issue now, it's pretty easy to see how we got where we are today. All of the decisions made sense at the time, because we couldn't foresee how things would play out when we were in the moment.
TLDR: Cable used to be harmless and fragmented until DOCSIS came around in the mid 90s. The government wasn't used to things happening at Internet speed, so by the time it became apparent that cable companies were competing with traditional telcos, it was too late.
Does no-one remember the really old acoustic coupled modems where you had to literally pick up the phone (utility) and place it on the receiver? All that happened was that we started plugging the phone line directly into an integrated modem - it's still going down the phone line for most people.
An ISP is a telecoms provider and should technically already be regulated as one...