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At present, it is impossible to predict long-term technological developments and the evolution of consumer preferences.
Ah yes, it is impossible to know whether a consumer will still want faster Internet in the future. They could enjoy the retro experience of a dial up modem making noises when connecting.
Or maybe the internet will be locked up by new terrible laws and high speeds are not needed for the allowed content.
They will literally make arguments for affirmative action and reparations as long as the beneficiary is a rich corporation instead of a human in need.
It's no longer the land of opportunity, it's the land of mediocrity.
So that's why vaccinations are dialed back, right? It's unfair to diseases?
jfc, you really do get the government you deserve, lol /s
They are just dialed up now
"Unfair" to telecoms who essentially stole billions from the American taxpayers and didn't build out what was promised
Twice, in Verizon's case
That's the fucking point!
FCC too corrupt to function
"Government clousures toilet factories, says it's unfair to diaper companies"
Dont give them such great ideas.
Major telecommunication companies collected billions of dollars through state rate increases and tax breaks since the 1990s under the promise of building high-speed fiber-optic networks, but largely failed to deliver the fully realized infrastructure.
So we pay, nothing happened, and now out of fairness, deal with it?
Brilliant!
I think they got like 100 billion or more, might have been several hundreds, in the Obama years, never delivered. Then a later administration, I think Biden's, gave them another such deal.
Probably just a bribe to buy access for projects like PRISM.
That surveilance data doesnt transport itself after all.
So we now go back to dialup?
I want my computer to screech at me when it connects to the internet.
They were trying to warn us of the horrors that awaited
Technologies have more protection against discrimination than people?
Companies have more voting power apparently
Corporations are people and dollars are speech 🙃
They can't fire Mitch McConnell, it would be unfair to all the living senators.
Those poor cable companies with their outdated tech.
"Government abandons attempt to electrify lighting, says it's unfair to flammable technologies"
Believe it or not, there actually was an effort to block electric lighting. Because it was someone’s job to walk around the neighborhoods and light all of the streetlights. And “protect the jobs” has historically been a really awful argument against technology.
An economist visits a site where a canal is being dug. He asks the foreman why the workers are digging with shovels, when a diesel-powered excavator could do the work of a hundred men. The foreman explains that the canal is a jobs project.
The economist exclaims, "Why didn't you say that it was a jobs project earlier?! These men should be digging with spoons!"
Alarm clocks are unfair to window knockers.
Infrastructure is important, and walking back from these gigabit targets is awful. There is no replacement for fiber. We all deserve to have access to fast internet.
But to yell at a cloud for a moment, if we're being honest most people should not need gigabit. I know everyone is a gamer now, but let's forget about bulk downloads. For normal browsing most people should not need much more than about 12mbps. 12 mbps is fast enough to have two 1080p h265 streams running concurrently. And yet, when you try to use the modern web at that speed, it's a terrible experience because of all the adtech bullshit that gets crammed into every page. When I measured this Ars article it was 6.53MB. That is, to borrow a yardstick from a blogpost I reread recently, long enough to fit 3 or 4 of the great Russian epics inside. It is bigger than the shareware version of DOOM, big enough to fit the entire python standard package library documentation. For one article.
Don't let this cheapen the FCC being chickenshit and captured by specific perverse corporate interests, but publishers have sold us a bridge when it comes to the modern web. Web3 was supposed to fix all this with micropayments. I'd gladly pay whatever my paltry share of Ars' CPM they expected to get out of my pageview, wouldn't you? But cryptobros turned it into a get-rich-quick slopfest and then it died.
edit: having meandered over to my computer because I just cannot sleep, I decided to measure the page as I access it, with ublock, noscript, and umatrix turned on. That article now weighs just over 724kB. Way better. Reader mode loses the images and gets the article down to 2.49kB. Meaning the actual content is roughly 0.04% of the delivered size of the original page. The stylesheet alone is many times the size of the content. I know I'm really indulging my old man energy but web pages do not need to be this large. I know cache exists, and that's fine, but it's still a bit ridiculous. Some people in this world do still use dialup and/or pay per MB. Your 6.5MB web page might cost somebody a nontrivial sum to read, relative to their means.
The irony is not lost on me that my home instance itself is not the most lightweight web app. The page I am using to edit this comment is 1.9MB. With the cache active it's <100kB transferred per page load but still, if I weren't a hypocrite I'd probably switch to a Piefed instance.
640K ought to be enough for anybody.
He was wrong then, and you're wrong that nobody needs gigabit. Stop handwringing for big corporations. This isn't a difficult thing to do, it just makes companies slightly less money. America has some of the most expensive internet in the world, and some of the worst per mb.
But to yell at a cloud for a moment, if we're being honest most people should not need gigabit.
For now*
The way tech moves, this won’t be the case forever. And it’ll be better to have it already then need it and have to wait another decade for it.
I get your point but also that's a bias borne from the industrial and technological revolutions, it's entirely possible that we may already are seeing the slow down of large scale technological advances from every 2-4 years seeing major leaps to every ten years or more, hell I cant think of any major tech jumps over the last 10 years of particular note outside of AI (hurk) and battery/ green energy neither of which need faster internet.
I remeber in the 90s deciding if it was worth removing line breaks in order to make my html on Geocities take up kbs less.
Most people hardly need internet at all, but that doesnt mean the option shouldnt be available. Working in IT, ive had architects in remote areas attempting to download revit files (sometimes many gigabytes in size) over a T1 connection (maximum 1.5mb/s). We convinced them to swap to a 4g connection after much back and forth.
Our internet needs are going up more and more over time, especially in the age of "vibe code and ship it". There are gonna be massive webpages, high quality video, and large downloads more often. 1gbps isn't that crazy of a goal to hit when my co-ax cable is putting out ~300 mbps.
Personally, just working from home, i have several instances where i need to download gigabyte+ files on company time, sometimes multiple times a day, but fiber isnt available yet. Add on my wife streaming something, guests phone connections, throttling, or just wifi interference and suddenly my 300mbps becomes something like 150 mbps or less, making an hour process 2 hours. Make it 5g and cloudy and now im fired for wasting company time.
The reality is that we're a big nation, and big nations are expensive and have insane needs. 1gbps can be achieved over coax fairly easily with enough infrastructure, but ISPs haaaatttteeee spending money when they can just collect a check instead
"We are eliminating the automotive safety standards because they are unfair to the dangerous cars"
actual clown logic
Yeah, that's pretty much exactly what they did.
techcrunch.com/2025/04/10/nhtsas-self-driving-safety-staff-reportedly-disproportionally-affected-by-doge-cuts/
Sounds like Elron got involved and started whining
Do roads next.
Thanks Elon.
so much for a government of the people, by the people, and for the people
Soon the US will be manufacturing external 28.8 kbps modems with a SCSI interface using steam powered tools.