Why so much whining about american broadband recently? I have "only" 6MBit connection, but I almost never see these speeds: only a handful of top-dogs like goog

Why so much whining about american broadband recently? I have "only" 6MBit connection, but I almost never see these speeds: only a handful of top-dogs like google/yahoo are capable of responding quickly. Flickr, PicasaWeb, GMail, ESPN and BaseCamp are my bottlenecks - it's them who are slow, not my connection. Even GoogleMaps got more sluggish recently, even without StreetView turned on. Faster broadband won't help those laggy services.