Hey, I have the same question.

having flashbacks to a time telcoms charged $$ per text. what a desperate move to extract every bit of $$ from the literal sharing of information

Really?

The same reason Reddit fucked everyone over, the same reason for mass tent cities in supposedly prosperous nations, the same reason we’re terraforming the planet to be hostile to human life: metastasizing capitalism that entire societies now subsist to stoke the growth of, to its own slow, painful destruction.

An economy is supposed to be a tool to facilitate the distribution of goods and services for the benefit of society. Yet we allow millions to suffer to protect the beloved economy. We were tricked into doing it ass backwards to benefit a few assholes at everyone else’s expense. That’s why data caps, microtransactions, regulatory/governmental capture, our decrepit K-12 system in literal ruin, sub living wages, etc are still a thing. You name a major problem here in the US, and I’ll show you something our hyper capitalist economy either causes, exacerbates, or stokes to keep the peasants at eachother’s throats to stop them from looking up and uniting against the problem.

Capitalism can be heavily, heavily, heavily regulated to be of service to a society. The Nordic nations do it, western Europe did until they caught the US’s insatiable greed disease. But without putting capitalism into a straight jacket, having a maximum income tied to a multiplier of the median wage, making corporations fund the society that provided the infrastructure for their success, and putting the needs of societal systems (utilities, education, social safetynet, etc) above the desires of the business community with the force of law, capitalism is a societal cancer that turns citizens against one another and gluts humanity’s worst impulses exclusively.

And since the American oligarch capitalists captured their regulators completely under Reagan almost a half century ago, the FCC either won’t indicate publically traded ISP greed, or won’t do anything about it. Greed won, and we all lost even though many are deluded into being grateful little capital batteries for their owners.

That is a fucking great question coming from the people who are literally in charge of regulating these sorts of things.

How dare anyone call it data caps? Almost everyone has unlimited¹ data!

¹ High speed data available up to one nanobyte of traffic. Speeds reduced to 1 bit/year after the high speed volume is used up. Pictures of domesticated llamas do not use up high speed volume.

Unchecked corporate greed.

Bit problem in Australia too