Yeah, I remember when "net neutrality" was something that the left was demanding.
Once they realized that they had a systematic advantage in petitioning hosting companies to deplatform disfavored content without due process, however, all of the underlying arguments for net neutrality were quietly discarded.
Net neutrality was never about deplatforming, due process, or censorship. It was about ISPs prioritizing traffic or providing free bandwidth for their own services and throttling or charging extra fees for third party services (e.g. Time Warner providing access to their own streaming service without counting towards your bandwidth cap, but not doing the same for Netflix).
The two can't be disentangled. Woke censorship is often justified through economic self-interest nowadays. Do you really believe activists 20 years ago would be placated if ISPs had simply promised to throttle only based on politics rather than economics?
Hosting content and distributing it are different things (in the same way that printing letters for someone is very different to operating a mail service carrying everyone's letters).
Once they realized that they had a systematic advantage in petitioning hosting companies to deplatform disfavored content without due process, however, all of the underlying arguments for net neutrality were quietly discarded.