Because they can. Most people’s typical usage isn’t impacted by low uplink bandwidth. Very few people are uploading 4K content or live streaming or hosting a high traffic webserver from their garage. Less bandwidth means less expense, thus more profit. Capitalism, baby.
Both Wired and Reddit are owned by Condé Nast. (Technically sister corps in Advance Publications: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advance_Publications)
This is a great question! I too have come to the realization that marketing is highly damaging to society. Commercials, ads, spam, flyers, etc. So much waste and invasion of privacy.
I’ve been trying to imagine what a world without marketing would look like for months.
In cetain areas, the consumer experience is greatly improved. No interruptions of TV or podcasts. Less bandwidth, ram, and cpu used when browsing web pages. No invasive individual tracking anywhere.
But the two major changes that require additional consideration:
How do businesses today that rely on ad revenue (web search, podcasts, etc) continue to exist and pay salaries and other expenses? A. These would all require a move to direct payment models. Either a usage fee or a subscription fee.
How do businesses source customers? Especially important for new businesses or new products that customers dont know about.
A. I dont have a clear solution here. But I would like to see two possible ways that are not mutually exclusive:
a. The Phone Book. It basically went extinct when the internet and web search became ubiquitous. But I’d like to see it return.
b. Service Brokers. Similar to above but businesses or humans in the loop to assist with supporting mapping of request to service provider.
With a., its pretty easy to make this physical, standardized and regulated to be fair/utilitarian
With b., it will require conscious effort to regulate and ensure consumers arent tracked and no business is given and unfair advantage.
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