Corvillus

In America, the government had given over $200,000,000,000 in taxpayer and customer money to the telecoms in order to upgrade the existing network of the country. If this money had been spent as was originally promised, Americans would have 40Mbps+ to the home. Instead, they have terrible connection speed compared to the world (they aren’t even in the top 10 anymore). And right now, rather than actually doing something to fix this embarrasing standing, they are doing things to worsen the quality of their Internet experience, such as blocking the net neutrality bill (basically a bill to ban telecoms from anti-competitive behaviour regarding Internet service, go to http://savetheinternet.com/ for more information on that).

This also affects me as a Canadian because:

1. The majority of the websites I use are served from America, so anything that affects their Internet connectivity will also affect my web browsing experience (downstream is only half of the equation).
2. As a developer, any web applications I write would be subject to whatever anti-competitive behaviour the American ISPs impose.
3. America tends to be the measuring stick for connectivity (Canada always tends to be a certain percentage faster than America when it comes to Internet connectivity), so if they had faster connections right now, chances are so would Canada.

Link to orignal article