The comparison to the power company is natural because the hardware infrastructure is similar, but the crucial difference is that power lines don't carry commun

The comparison to the power company is natural because the hardware infrastructure is similar, but the crucial difference is that power lines don't carry communications (for the most part). Energy is more easily made into a commodity because it can be quantified in natural physical units. For communications it's much harder. The definition of "services" like YouTube will be necessarily incomplete because its definition is socially-mediated to begin with. Or, if ISPs were to charge based not on services but instead go deeper, so e.g. ICMP and UDP might be cheaper than TCP, you still need to rely on some judgment made by someone out there. These necessarily incomplete definitions will create huge inefficiencies in the system as a whole, generate useless extra work, and so on. It hobbles the system as a whole in order to provide the justification for price differentials which would drive profits for ISPs. This is basically a money grab on the part of the ISPs (natural monopolies).