Over at Balloon Juice, mistermix reports on how America’s internet service is being left in the dust by . . . wait for it . . . Lithuania. Lithu – fuckin – ania. Apparently, service (10/1 Mbps) that costs $40 - $60 here (depending on where you live) used to cost only $14.72 in Lithuania. I say “used to cost” because Lithuania just doubled its speed with no increase in cost. Which means that right now we in America are paying 3 or 4 times what Lithuanians pay and getting internet service at half the speed.
(Click through and read mistermix’s entire post; weep at the fact that American internet service is half-speed compared to Lithuania’s worst service, and that if you were in Lithuania and willing to pay a little more you would have access to internet speeds that you can only dream about here in America.)
Look, I’ve resigned myself to the fact that the United States isn’t going to even make an effort to keep up with Korea or Japan – I mean, they’re supposed to be the high-tech havens of the world. And I’ve even resigned myself to the fact that the United States isn’t going to even make an effort to keep up with Western Europe. But when our tech infrastructure is being left in the dust by Lithu – fuckin – ania, a former Soviet bloc country . . . Jesus! we aren’t even trying anymore.
What really ticks me off about this is that there is absolutely no reason for us to lag so far behind the rest of the developed world. But by our policy decisions we have chosen to do so – it didn’t just evolve this way in the United States, we picked this outcome because, basically, we don’t understand what “free market capitalism” means.
