Sorry, one of my pet peeves is when people say "the Web of [insert time here] is dead!" when the Web has never been more accessible both from a consumer standpoint and from a developer standpoint. The existence of Facebook and Google can be completely ignored if you actually want to. Emphasis on if you actually want to.
85% of Americans live in urban areas where they would have at least the choice of one cable provider (Comcast, Charter), one DSL provider (AT&T), all of the satellite providers (HugesNet), and at least the big four cell phone providers. Not to mention local dial-up providers which do still exist.
Again, it all comes back to the idea of some people "wish" the web of the 2000s still existed, but aren't willing to sacrifice the comforts of the 2010's web to make it happen. You can host your own lightweight website but Wordpress and Facebook is easier. You can search the web without tracking and Javascript but the modern websites don't work without it. You can pick from a huge variety of ISPs but they won't all be at 100 Mbps. Basically, you can have the web of the 2000s, but it comes at the cost of some of the conveniences of the 2010s web. A lot of people aren't willing to make that trade.
Nostalgia is hard. It seemed amazing back then but not many people would choose to go back to dial-up and phpMyAdmin. For those who say they would... what's stopping you? It all still exists today.
Actually it might just be easier to link to the Wikipedia article about ISPs serving the US because there are a lot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_broadband_providers_in...
Sorry, one of my pet peeves is when people say "the Web of [insert time here] is dead!" when the Web has never been more accessible both from a consumer standpoint and from a developer standpoint. The existence of Facebook and Google can be completely ignored if you actually want to. Emphasis on if you actually want to.