Comparing Title II utilities to water and electricity is silly. How happy are you with your landline telephone and cable TV services? You know, the ones that everyone hates and is replacing with internet-carried alternatives?
The single time I had a problem with how it was billed, I called the state regulator who worked with my telco to sort out how taxes were being calculated. It turned out that they were billing me correctly, but couldn't explain it over the phone.
I replaced my landline with an Ooma (a VOIP phone which let me port my old landline number) which sounds WORLDS better, lets me manage personal blocklists, aggregates community blocklists to automatically filter incoming calls from telemarketers, political parties, etc, sends voicemails to my email, integrates with Google Voice, can ring on multiple phones or devices, and other such things. It's in a completely different class of service, and it costs a fraction of what my competing local offerings do.
However, your VOIP will not work during a power outage, during an internet outage, or any other time the VOIP company's servers are down.
Landlines work during power outages, during internet outages, and they provide around 5 nines of uptime (that's less than 6 minutes of downtime a year).
Those are the things your $35 a month buys you. How important that reliability is to you generally depends on your health. I know more than a few folks who would never give up their landline, because they have medical conditions which depend on reliable access to 911.
That leaves only VOIP provider outages as a concern, and I've yet to experience one of those in a few years.
When I had a landline telephone, I was completely happy with it. It was inexpensive and reliable, and if I was unsatisfied with my service I could choose from several other providers. I could use my own equipment with it, all of the consumer electronics were interoperable with any service provider, and I never had an outage (to my knowledge; I didn't get a lot of phone calls). I had a wide variety of options for dialup internet at the time, either through my phone provider or other competing providers. This was in a small town in northern Idaho, too, and it wasn't exactly known as a telecommunications hub or city of industry.
I am unhappy with my cable TV service, which is provided by the same company as my cable internet service. My cable provider is the only one in my area, and has no incentive to do anything other than take slightly more of my money every year in exchange for performing zero upgrades or service improvements.
This is just a single data point, but only one of the two companies I mention above is subject to Title II regulation currently, and it's coincidentally the one that I had a good experience with.