But the true link speed's not even what's being asked for. 4K Netflix never goes above 20 Mbps as far as I know, so getting just 1/50 the advertised speed to one of the most well-known internet services in existence, hardly seems like a big ask, especially when the only reason that it can't reach that speed or higher is because of the ISP, given that swapping to one that aren't being knobheads about it fixes the problem. It should be the responsibility of the ISP to keep links to other parts of the internet as open as possible. If real-world constraints prevent the speed from being all that high, because it's a shitty server in Australia, then that's understandable. This however, isn't that.

All I'm getting from this is that it's a good idea to label ISPs utilities and bring the hammer down if they're being knobheads about it.

It is mostly the middle, and not either of the endpoints, that is the real problem. You have a 1Gbps link, the Netflix DC you're reaching probably has multiple links with aggregated bandwidth measured in Tbps, but at some point in between the two there's a 10Gbps link being shared between 5000 subscribers at peak times and now the bottleneck is 2Mbps per subscriber. This link may or may not be under your ISP's (or Netflix's ISP's) control, and it may or may not be the only relevant bottleneck.

The solution that was developed in the Netflix-Comcast fight over a decade ago is content distribution. Instead of trying to build out extra capacity in every possible link, you shorten the path and thus reduce the number of contended links involved in each interaction. This scales much better, but it has two major problems: the first is rightsholders and their obnoxious anti-piracy restrictions, and the second is good old jurisdictional friction and economic misalignment. Somebody has to own the physical servers in all the myriad locations that keep the content closer to the consumer. If the ISP owns them, then they naturally want to exploit them. If Netflix owns them, they naturally don't want to serve their competitors. If a third party owns them, you address those two problems (potentially) but add new ones around liability, non-disclosure, competitiveness, etc.

If regulation is going to be useful here, it needs to focus on opening up opportunities to serve the unsexy middle of the infrastructure puzzle and not just the most visible parts that consumers/voters usually interact with. Also, "Netflix" needs to be understood as just a stand-in for any high-bandwidth Internet service, as the landscape is constantly changing.