Comment by loup-vaillant

That's not how the market went because the market is often moronic. Case in point: QWERTY. (Why QWERTY is actually the best layout ever is left as an exercise to the occasional extremist libertarian)

Yes, traffic patterns at the time was heavily slanted towards downloads. I know about copper wires and how download and upload limit each other. Still, setting that situation in stone was very limiting. It's a self fulfilling prophecy.

You don't want to host your server at home because you don't have upload. The ISP sees nobody has servers at home so they conclude nobody needs upload. Peer-to-peer file sharing and distribution is slower than YouTube because nobody has any upload. Therefore everybody uses YouTube, and the ISP concludes nobody uses peer-to-peer distribution networks.

And so on and so forth. It's the same trend that effectively forbid people to send e-mail from home (they have to ask a big shot provider such as Gmail to do it for them, with MITM spying and advertisement), or the rise of ISP-level NAT, instead of giving everyone a public IPv6 address like they all deserve (including on mobile).

There is a point where you have to realise the internet is increasingly centralised at every level because powerful special interests want it to be that way.

Regulation is what we need. Net neutrality is a start. Next in line should be mandated symmetric bandwidth, no ISP-wide firewall (the local router can have safe default settings), public IP (v4 or v6) for everyone, and no restriction on usage patterns (the ISP should not be allowed to forbid servers). Ultimately, our freedom of expression and freedom of information depends on this. They are messing with human rights.