Re: A difficult balancing act.
A sample of US internet service: I've lived in two US places, Cleveland, Ohio (Cox) and Salt Lake City, Utah (Comcast). Both places, the service, although arguably a bit pricey, was/is nearly always at least the "up to" speed for the contract. Cox was a bit more reliably so, and suffered fewer unplanned interruptions (1 in 10 years vs 2 (but shorter ones) in 2 years); all were fairly brief. Cox had one major problem with their email servers, in which I believe some users lost messages; I did not, maybe due to downloading every few minutes. Cox upgraded their network, and speed, and maintained equal or lower prices over the period. My Comcast experience is too short to judge that.
I am sure that service is poorer, and speedier connections costlier in less urban areas, but I can't see that the recent FCC action offers much to solve the problem of covering costlier facilities with lower payments by fewer customers.
The matter of monopolistic ISPs was being addressed already. I had the option in Cleveland of at&t and Cox. I sampled at&t, found it wanting (but still decent), and reverted to Cox. In the Salt Lake valley there are offerings from Comcast, CenturyLink, UTOPIA (a home-grown municipal consortium), a local radio based provider, and in the future, Google. Not all are available in all cities, but my impression is that all or most subscribers have the option of at least two offerings of 50 megabits or more.
The order seems to a significant degree to be the result of successful rent seeking by certain large users, abetted by stirring up considerable popular alarm based on the threat of possibilities that, for the most part, do not seem to exist. The two I can remember are Comcast ditching torrent connections and, more recently, Comcast throttling of Netflix to pressure them to collocate some servers. The first was found out fairly quickly and they were shamed out of it; it seems unlikely that something like that will be repeated any time soon. The second was resolved sensibly by a commercial arrangement, which resulted in a small rise in my Netflix rate. I don't consider that outcome unreasonable: the customers (and government subsidies, presently lacking) need to cover the operating and maintenance costs of the infrastructure, and it strikes me as fairer to allocate the marginal cost of supporting intensive users like Netflix to their customers rather than to the ISP subscriber base as a whole.