Exactly. Track point is the number one reason
Sucks living in an authoritarian country with a military dictatorship that spies on its citizens at all levels, pumps propaganda into their homes and schools, and if you disagree with any of it the whole society thinks you’re terrorist and tries to “reeducate” you.
It’s worse than collusion. The break up of AT&T resulted in a legal construction of Franchise Agreements that legally granted regional monopolies in all major population centers in the country in a deliberate bid to avoid Sherman antitrust rules. It’s not merely collusion, you literally cannot compete by law.
ISPs in the US are not in a price war with competition, that’s ridiculous. The price per gig has been going down as infrastructure build out happens in the middle mile. In the last mile, prices are still abusively high with predatory bundling contracts. The reason their customer service sucks is because their customers don’t have 30 options. They have at most 2 and in many places they have 1 option.
The solution is not centralization, the solution is a protocol. The team at Flattr tried to do something that worked for content, but it was centralized. The team at Ganxy tried to expand the definition of monetize, but it was centralized. If we had a protocol where teams could publish metadata that enabled users to use any data-driven app to generate some form of compensation for the contributors, then we could build all sorts of workflows into package managers that made it easier.