squareallworthy:

Traffic management that involves prioritizing some throughput over others is the norm, not some weird thing Comcast thought up to make more money. We don’t demand that roads treat all vehicles alike, or that delivery companies treat all packages alike. Yes, as far as a wire is concerned, 01010101 is the same as 11110000, but we don’t have to be limited by a wire’s dumbness. Insisting that the switching system treats them the same ignores what bytes are for. Some information really is more important.

The United States absolutely insisted that railroads treat all cargo alike, that is the foundation of the national regulatory state, even before the New Deal.

Because before it started doing that the dynamic of an open frontier bottlenecked through monopoly routes of transportation made economy of scale so powerful it started a death-spiral of economic centralization, that was where the robber barons and trusts (to later be busted) came from

So much of the 20th century regulatory state was beta tested on 19th century railroads – Social Security (after railroad pensions), workers’ comp and workplace safety law, wire (telegraph and telephone) regulations, public utilities, the trucking and airline regulations that ended under Carter

But yes, we very much have made demands like that for the sake of fending off structural capture tending towards oligarchy