Not necessarily. Consumers would prefer the probable lower prices of tiered services. Yet in the long run this would hurt consumers by throwing up barriers to startups and competition among internet services. This is an example of how markets favor short-term interests (lower ISP prices) over long-term.

Another example: advertising-subsidized media. Used to be (100 years ago) newspapers didn't necessarily runs ads. There was a rich working-class press. Then the ad-subsidized model came out and it slashed the price of newspapers, but on the condition that the content was generally business friendly. (Otherwise they wouldn't get many advertisers.) So nobody bought the working-class newspapers anymore because they were too expensive. This had a massive impact on the tone and perspective of published media that persists to this day.

Quite possibly the opposite: new entrants wouldn't try to compete on general-purpose internet service but would deploy a service that's cheap because it's sponsored by large content providers, and those content providers would get preferential treatment.

This is a bad assumption that any new competition would act differently than the status quo. More competitors would make it harder to have a solid argument of "pay me, or else", but that wouldn't stop some behind-the-scenes collusion.

No, because telecom specifically has very high barriers to entry (infrastructure, licensing, etc).

Probably not; ISPs don't do traffic shaping because they're evil, they do it because it saves them money. The average customer probably cares more about the price of their broadband and the big number in front of it, not whether they get full utilization.

Possibly but it hinges a lot on drastically increased in an often prohibitively expensive commercial sector and it would take a lot longer than enforcing one, and then encouraging competition to bring speeds up and overall cost of bandwidth down for consumers.

And there's been lots of no compete agreements among these ISPs and I'm sure there's other examples out there where the "competition" makes it better for all of them at the expense of consumers.

Originally the answer is No, because shaping reduces costs for overburdened (older) networks, and these these are infrastructure-heavy regional markets so the entry cost is already very high for competition.

But then you have companies like Google who can come in an put in Fiber because they're a tech conglomerate who can subsidize these costs in other ways.

'Competition' isn't the panacea solving all problems that some make it out to be.