[kokekolo]

The internet access is largely recognized as utility. The internet services (email, hosting, video sharing, messengers, cloud storage, etc) aren't really a part of that utility. Many ISPs offer some of their own services in addition to the access (@aol.com email anyone?), but that can cause issues if the user moves to a location where their old ISP is not available, or if ISP goes bust.

[WorldMaker]

Though it is worth pointing out that it was in that earlier model where ISPs covered most "infrastructure services" that the internet was most often classified as a utility. Your utility provider gives you all the services that you need to use your utility.

Now we are in a much weirder situation where services to use the utility are provided by companies you don't have a direct utility provider relationship with. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it's a new thing that doesn't follow the traditional "rules" and analogy models of traditional utilities. If you have electrical problems you call your energy company. If you have telephone problems you call your phone company. If you have internet problems you can't just call your ISP to fix them.

I think a lot of these growing pains with "is the internet a utility?" and "is email a utility?" and "is Facebook a utility?" are happening precisely because we've passed a boundary of what "utility" means both governmentally and culturally. When your ISP was your email provider, the government had power to regulate it is a utility service: if your ISP didn't support things that kept you safe the government in theory could mandate it as a part of the limited regional monopoly rights granted to an ISP. When Google is your email provider the government has no such rights, and yet Google has far and away de facto become much of a "regional monopoly" for email than was ever expected to possible pre-internet. A lot of the specifics of Facebook weren't exactly on the radar as 1990s internet services, but suddenly for many people are required services with monopolistic lockdown.

There aren't easy answers here. We've passed beyond the 20th Century definitions of "utility". We probably need a new vocabulary for all of this. We probably need to collectively "sit down" and establish what all our new boundaries are, what powers we expect corporations to have over our lives, and which we expect to return to governments (as regulatory powers), and which we expect to collectively need to disrupt (through existing monopoly laws and trust busting exercises). Unfortunately no easy answers, just a lot of work to do that we'll probably collectively continue to procrastinate.