[cannonedhamster]

Cities have some of the most expensive internet rates. The US has some of the most expensive internet in the entire world. Your distance argument only makes sense if you take away the billions given to ISPs to lay black fiber. Cities would be super cheap internet. That's not what happened. ISPs charge exorbitant fees for a service they barely keep up to date. Remote settlements are often what allows those cities to exist and who are you to tell people where and how they should live?

[dantheman]

People can and should live anywhere they want. We however should not subsidize it. This way the true cost of living there is apparent, and if the services/resources they provide are needed then the cost of those services/resources will need to go up so that they can afford to live there.

[ajmurmann]

I'm not saying that there aren't systemic problems with ISPs in the US. I don't think the market is properly solving the issue on many areas because there is no significant competition. The impact from Google just announcing fiber coming at some point to an area was significant. Also net neutrality should be a no-brainer. I'm however unwilling to focus on bringing the wonders of civilization to people who decided to move as far away as possible from it. I also might be disgruntled because it's largely the same people who then turnaround and punish you for it with their vote.

[rayiner]

Survey after survey shows that the US beats most large European countries for internet speeds. So how does the meme that ISPs barely keep the service up to date survive?

[adventured]

There's always immense lag between when the anti-US propaganda online catches up with reality.

For example, the US has a great beer market now. It took several years before US beer - as a broad concept - was removed from the official foreigner list of things to bash the US with (which still includes such fan favorite fallback items as American cheese and Hershey chocolate).

That the US has had faster Internet access than most of Europe - including Germany and France - for the past decade, is a bash list counter that people intentionally pretend doesn't exist. It's very inconvenient reality and your typical American has no idea what the access speeds are across Europe, so they can't counter argue properly.

The access cost issue is also - fairly - of course on the bash list, although people never adjust for the far higher US incomes when pointing it out, naturally.

The US rolled out 4G much faster than Europe and it's going to roll out 5G much faster than Europe. That too is universally, intentionally ignored (despite the stream of articles you can google on the subject reporting how far behind Europe was in rolling out 4G and now again with 5G). That despite the fact that these items are matters of infrastructure and the US is supposed to be the worst on the planet when it comes to infrastructure (the US is spending more of its GDP on infrastructure than the EU).

[nitrogen]

Which US city vs which European city? What metric? Median throughput? 99th percentile latency? Worst case packet loss? Is the average good but some places really terrible while in Europe the worst case is closer to the average?