As of November 29, 2025, major U.S. tech platforms like Facebook/Meta, Google/YouTube, X (Twitter), etc. have not been classified or regulated as public utilities or common carriers under U.S. federal law.

Key points:

• There is no federal statute or FCC rule that designates social media or search platforms as public utilities or common carriers. They remain primarily governed by the Communications Act framework (including Section 230) and general competition/consumer-protection law, not utility-style rate or nondiscrimination regulation. (en.wikipedia.org)
• Texas’s HB 20 explicitly claims large social media platforms are common carriers and imposes nondiscrimination duties, and Florida passed a similar law; these are the closest moves toward utility-style obligations. (en.wikipedia.org) However, the U.S. Supreme Court in Moody v. NetChoice (covering both the Texas and Florida cases) vacated the lower-court rulings and remanded, while leaving injunctions in place, so neither law is in force. (en.wikipedia.org) The Court did not endorse treating platforms as common carriers or utilities.
• Other recent laws, such as the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act targeting TikTok, or various state child-safety and age-verification statutes (many of which are being blocked in court), are narrow, issue-specific regulations, not a general public-utility regime applied to “major big tech platforms.” (en.wikipedia.org)
• Commentary and legal analysis continue to stress that social media and search companies are not public utilities and argue against imposing utility-style or common-carrier regulation on them. (wired.com)
• Even for broadband ISPs—where utility-style treatment has the strongest foothold—an attempt to reimpose Title II/common-carrier classification and net neutrality rules was struck down by the Sixth Circuit in Ohio Telecom Association v. FCC in 2025, underscoring judicial resistance to expanding utility-style regulation rather than cementing it. (en.wikipedia.org)

Given that, by several years after the 2021 prediction, major platforms have not been regulated in a manner similar to public utilities in the U.S., and the leading efforts to move in that direction are either blocked or not in effect, the prediction is best classified as wrong for the implied "coming years" timeframe.