Upon reading the latter portion of your comment, a potential story for XKCD comic immediately sprang to mind...something along the lines of a tech person or tea

Upon reading the latter portion of your comment, a potential story for XKCD comic immediately sprang to mind...something along the lines of a tech person or team invent faster-than-lightspeed technology, but abandon their work on a spacecraft warp-style engines to improve satellite internet....because its just so much easier to make tons of money doing barely the minimum within the ISP monopoly business. lol :-D