Think. How would the content providers - any of them, from Disney to Facebook - get their content at the consumer without the data-distributors, from Comcast to AT&T ?
The saying is internet kills the middleman, but this is the real middleman that needs to be killed, and just as our roads are free and open to everyone, so should the digital roads be.
Comcast and AT&T aren't the middle-man. They build a necessary part of the infrastructure necessary to get content to the consumer. They're no more the middle-man than FedEx or UPS. Companies like Netflix, etc, are the middle-men: selling other peoples' content over other peoples' wires.
Vis-a-vis roads: the public pays for the roads, while the cable networks have been almost entirely built with private money. Transportation is also a good example of why you probably don't want publicly-funded telecom networks. Older suburbanites vote, younger people don't. That means we have tons of highways out to the suburbs, and decrepit public transportation.
My parents switched from FIOS back to DISH because they missed their low-res Indian channels. They'll be the people voting to decide how much public money to allocate to broadband. Will you be happy with their decision? Especially now that states and cities are out of money? When push comes to shove and it's shoring-up public pensions versus building broadband, where will the money go?
When people say "free and open", that's context enough to know that they mean free as in freedom, not as in beer. Please stop using this silly red herring.
I honestly didn't perceive it as "free as in freedom" in the above context.
That said, roads aren't that, either. Try driving on one without a license, insurance, using them in ways that are disapproved of / disallowed (speeding heavily, drinking and driving, etc) to see. Alternatively, use the road to play a game of football. I don't really think they're "free as in freedom", either.
Stop it. You're being purposely obtuse if you're trying to equate freedom as the freedom to do crazy and nonsensical things versus freedom as a sense of liberty for people to access information, resources or services (regardless of if it's in the context of the Internet or public roads).
Your argument is in the same vein as people who try to win the debate over if we have freedom of speech or not by saying we don't because we can't yell "fire!" in a crowded movie theater. Context is everything; you can't just ignore it conveniently because you're trying to save an argument that you made under a misinterpretation. Why do we have the 1st Amendment? Because the founders wanted to preserve the ability for people to make politically averse opinions in opposition to those in power, not because the founders wanted people to be to somehow able defy the laws of the natural world.
People are fighting for a free and open Internet, because it has value in being able to quick access to important and useful information without restriction, not because of some super-literal definition of "freedom" or because we want it for 0 dollars and 0 cents.
OF course they are not really 'free', but does Amazon pay toll to get things delivered to you? Do government bodies who maintain the roads, tax large suppliers to make use of them?
