Okay, walk me through this :)

Your argument is that Net Neutrality isn't necessary, because consumers weren't abused to the degree that people were warned about once Net Neutrality was no longer in effect. Of course, companies have abused the market in Net Neutrality's absence, but you're only looking at abuses after 2018.

And when confronted with abuses that happened after 2018, your response is to say that Net Neutrality post-2018... was still in effect.

I'm not sure how you're expecting people to react to that kind of logic? But I don't think that asking "why weren't people abused in the absence of the law that was still being enforced?" comes across as quite as strong of an argument as you might be imagining.

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I don't mean to be too snarky here, so to clarify and expand on the above: the existence of California's Net Neutrality laws are what people have been referring to when we talk about state-level regulations that kept the post-2018 landscape from getting as bad as it could have gotten. This is not a surprise, I literally brought up California's Net Neutrality rules in my comment above, and it's just kind of wild to me that you were apparently aware of them but didn't think to ask yourself whether or not they might have impacted the post-2018 commercial landscape.

To go back to the dog analogy, people are fending off the wild dog with a stick, and you're over on the side saying, "see, the dog hasn't attacked anybody, we don't need to leash it", and then the dog bites a volunteer firefighter and your response is, "well, clearly the stick didn't help, so that's even more evidence that leashing the dog is a waste of time." :)

You should of course be aware (having read through the link that you shared) that California was sued by both the industry and by the DOJ itself to try and repeal that law, so it seems fairly clear both that the industry viewed state-level NN as a constraint on its behavior and that the industry and administration of the time wanted those regulations to go away. It's reasonable to conclude that state-level interventions like California's helped curb industry abuse.

Nevertheless, as the article I posted above points out:

> When the Trump FCC repealed the 2015 Open Internet Order, it didn’t just eliminate the prohibitions against blocking and throttling and paid prioritization. [..] it also gave away oversight over the broadband industry. The FCC abdicated its responsibility to protect consumers and competition in the broadband market. That is the most important thing that happened on December 14th, 2017 when the FCC repealed the Open Internet Order.

> [...] and the fire department had no place to go. They can’t go to the FCC because the FCC abdicated their authority over broadband. They wouldn’t go to the FTC because they take forever to adjudicate complaints. So if Verizon throttles your broadband, there’s nothing they can do about it.

The repeal of Net Neutrality on the grounds that the FCC did not have the authority to regulate in this area effectively got rid of a broad class of federal regulation and recourse against abusive behavior; there was a rippling effect beyond just zero-rating or content-targeted throttling/blocking.

So while California's Net Neutrality enforcement was a good thing for the country overall and did help to curb abuses for the country overall, it is still not a full substitute for the federal government doing its job regulating bad behavior and protecting consumers.