We could make all the laws we want about Net Neutrality, it wouldn't change the fundamental flaw that made this problem possible in the first place: too much centralization. I hear that the US, there are only 2 ISPs: one of the big 2, or the little local one. In France, we have about 4. At the other end, we have Google, Amazon, but most notably we have YouTube and Netflix. Clearly the market is not efficient. Why do…
4 major broadband providers would be a lot better than 2. In the US, the two are the cable TV company, and the telephone company. Recently, a telephone companies came to a marketing agreement with the cable companies; the telco would control the wireless connections, and stop seriously competing on the wired broadband side. So, we might be moving to de facto monopolies for fixed line. How does France have 4 providers…
It's still bad, and we still have a relatively high barrier to entry, but it is possible. There exist for instance a number of little non-profit providers (not among the big 4), who make do by sub-leasing part of the big one's network.
There are still problems of the sort you're talking about (like "it's not us, it's the other company your data goes through"), but as people are now able to cut themselves off completely from the historical operator, their actual provider has to (and do) take responsibility, and fix the line.
As an aside, it is somewhat written in our law that to be called an "internet connection", it must provide a public IP address, and the user must be able to do whatever she wants. There are violations (Orange blocks the outgoing SMTP port), but it mostly holds: users are all allowed to host servers —though asymmetric bandwidth makes this impractical. Note that mobile connections are called "data" deals, not "internet" deals.