I’m an unfortunate captive of the oligopoly of the internet industry in the USA. In many places, you have 2-3 choices of internet, and all of them suck ass. I’m in this situation. All internet providers in my area have a 1-1.5 terabyte data cap. So when I download Call of Duty for 250 gb and it fails and has to update or reinstall, I’ve wasted 500 gb, and have now reached 50% of my data cap in just 1 day. There are crazy fees, for example, Cox Cable says:

If you go over, we’ll automatically add 50 gigabytes of data for $10 to your next bill. That’s enough for about 15 hours of streaming HD video. If you use that 50 gigabytes, we automatically add another 50 gigabytes for $10 and so on until you reach our $100 limit of data overage charges or until your next usage cycle begins.

So your $90 a month internet can easily become $190 a month, which is fuckin criminal, like that is so scummy and asinine how that can even be legal. But it is perfectly legal. The FCC is also looking into these data caps but now that we have a new anti-federal government president elect… This is probably toast… Nothing will change now that most federal agencies are about to be deleted.

From a technology standpoint too, nothing is really getting better

Comcast is still using Coax instead of Fiber Optic and desperately trying to convince people that somehow, someway coax can be just as good. Do with that info what you will, I have no opinions on it. There was a Federal program started recently to expand rural internet access, which will probably be gutted in 2025 leaving many without suitable internet again. Fiber Optic is fast, but still, not new technology, and doesn’t solve a critical issue… It doesn’t matter if you have 2 Gigabit internet if no one in the world is uploading even half that fast. A single download on Steam is like 450 Mbps, Epic Games launcher is horrifically slow. I get like 120 Mbps max when downloading Fortnite updates even with 1500 Mbps internet hard wired to my router with top tier hardware

It’s just sad to think about the future of internet in the USA, and knowing we’ll be imprisoned by these data caps for the foreseeable future.

    • hendrikEnglish
      1•2 months ago

      Nah, Those were different times. You can’t directly compare a time when is was perfectly fine to own people, or have them die in large quantities while working in the mines or building the railroads, to modern day neoliberalism and turbo capitalism. I mean a lot of time has passed since then. And we invented social capitalism, workplace safety in the meantime. We kinda agreed that forced labor is to be frowned upon. That is all connected and has it’s roots in industrialization. Yes. But living situations changed massively. The way companies are set up changed. And we’re generally not living in the age of industrialization anymore.

      I’d say it has happened in the latter half of the 1900s, after WW2. At first there was an economic boom in quite some areas of the world, people got wealthier. Way more educated during the early 19th century. Especially in the USA. Wealth was distributed more evenly. And sometime after, things took a turn for the worse. For example the US disconnected from the rest of the western world with life expectancy. Healthcare was made into a rip-off. Education decreased. Newspapers, access to (neutral) information which flourished at times, became the media landscape it is today…

      That all happened within the last 60 years or so.