In some ways, I think that (nearly) ubiquitous broadband is a big part of the problem. In, say, the 90s / early 2000s, with dialup internet, it was mostly impr

In some ways, I think that (nearly) ubiquitous broadband is a big part of the problem. In, say, the 90s / early 2000s, with dialup internet, it was mostly impractical to download software or operating systems, so it came on a pile of floppies or a CD, and didn't phone home or use a cloud account to operate or constantly update itself. Then, the low-bandwidth connectivity by a modem was only useful for human-to-human communication like BSS, usenet, irc, or hyper-optimized webpages and applications. The average website for, say, a bank, airline, or train company is basically a huge ad, with any ability to actually transact or buy tickets a worse experience than it was with simple HTML forms / server side web apps. I also think that the idea that broadband is a necessity that should be subsidized and universally accessible is highly questionable. It seems to me that FAANG have been able to socialize the costs of their ad/content/malware delivery, but keep the profits private. Somehow, I can't help but wonder if things wouldn't be better if average residential bandwidth were limited to, say 1mbps, but symmetrical, low-latency, and perhaps some separate system for distributing software images that was more like bittorrent or ipfs where you get the content, but there is no actual high-bandwidth, trackable connection back to the vendor.