There's a core misunderstanding around net neutrality. People see it as business-stifling regulation and its removal as deregulation. This is simply false.

All last mile ISPs and wireless carriers are state-enforced oligopolies or monopolies. You can't build these things without some mix of federal, state, and local permission, and in many cases taxpayer funds helps subsidize the construction of these networks or tax breaks are provided.

Telecom is not a free market and never has been. Telecoms are not really private companies in any unfettered free market sense. They're closer to the status of majority-of-revenue government contractors like Lockheed or Raytheon. Add the revolving door they have with representatives and they're almost like state-owned industries.

Net neutrality is there to prevent a state-backed oligopoly from using its position to stifle competition in the free market. In other words it's a pro-free-market regulation that exists to protect the free market from interference by state monopolies.

I personally think it would be just as good to eliminate barriers to entry for broadband and wireless competition, but unfortunately on a pragmatic level (at least in the USA) this is orders of magnitude more difficult politically. So net neutrality is the best solution for now.