This is very true, but the flipside is that the patterns of messages over the network matter, too. Improperly designed communication protocols result in propag

This is very true, but the flipside is that the patterns of messages over the network matter, too. Improperly designed communication protocols result in propagation delay, which is different from latency. Many real-world applications indirectly suffer from propagation delay, and many of the largest sites have tricks for minimizing delay, and some large companies even want older protocols abandoned due to their inefficient communication. The reason LANs generally haven't cared about propagation delay is that they are not using networks already operating near the ultimate bottleneck: the speed of light. Some college campuses I know of have less bandwidth than an iPhone. But for Internet-scale computing, propagation delay is evident.