Check out this article by Sean Hollister over at the The Verge.

Sean makes a great case for why our Internet Service Providers in America are the worst. For the most part, there is limited access in certain parts of cities. For example, my only option was to go with Comcast (who I really hate) to my new home. That doesn’t give Comcast much of a reason to make me happy as a customer. They can give me a data cap (which they have) and slow my speeds down, or charge me more for basic service, and there’s not much I can do about it. They are just crooks.

I found this particularly interesting:

We consistently pay more than Europe regardless of speed, according to a fascinating, approachable study you should read from the New America think tank. In fact, we pay roughly double that of Europe at the 100Mbps and 1,000Mbps tiers, and eight to 17 times more to rent a modem on average than Asia and Europe do, respectively. Only one US city cracked the top ten in affordability but only because it had an ace up its sleeve: a municipal fiber-optic network erected by the city itself, where ISPs provide their services across fiber that the residents themselves own. Those sorts of municipal networks create competition that simply doesn’t exist in many places in the US because it wasn’t designed to exist. In places that do erect municipal networks, New America shows that both speed and affordability far outpace the rest of the US.

The rest of the world has eclipsed us when it comes to internet service providers. I know my parents have signed up with their community internet service provider and saved a lot of money and now receive faster speeds as well. I just wish this was more prevalent and that these companies didn’t lock out competition.

With all the focus on Big Tech these days, why don’t they look at