[fivre]

For consumer-facing eyeball ISPs, in almost all US markets, consumers have an extremely limited set of ISPs to choose from, typically a traditional telephone provider like AT&T or Verizon and a traditional cable provider like Comcast or Cox (if they're lucky enough to have both). As such, those eyeball providers have an effective monopoly, and if I don't like the network policies of my ISP, I have almost no recourse to change them. Those monopoly providers have also consistently lobbied against any challenges to their position: attempts to start a municipal ISP offering services to residents will be strongly challenged by incumbent providers, often to the point of outlawing municipal ISPs entirely at the state level.

In contrast, I can very much choose alternate providers for everything else you've listed--I don't like GoDaddy and don't use them for domain registration or hosting, and I had thousands of options to choose from. Twitter is by no means the only social network in town, and has challengers within its specific microblogging niche.

[drdaeman]

So, you don't really need a law for AT&T to not policy your traffic, but that you need competitors to be able to enter the market and provide services. Something even Facebook and Google has (although they're quite close to a monopoly) but US ISPs don't.

If a service provider starts to do some silly stuff no one wants, there's no reason not to start a competing business, offer service without that silliness and win over the market. Except if entry barriers are too high.