You are not wrong - in reality we have had a tiered internet for years now, where big sites pay for faster transfers over better routes.

However nothing says you actually have to use these fancy services. Everyone wants a quick loading site but the drawback of an extra 100ms are minimal. Almost everyone should be more concerned with good site design and minimizing client-side dependencies if they want good performance.

Why would you say extra 100ms is a minimal drawback? Google obsesses over load time because faster load time means more ad dollars generated.

700ms vs 800ms is the difference between acceptable and a slow loading web site.

https://www.google.com/ has 2.76s load time for me. Gmail 6.33s. Amazon 1.41s. Aliexpress 2.69s. Seems like entire Internet is slow?

It matters for websites, but only after fixing many other problems with performance and usability.

For an individual user, it doesn't matter to me if I use a website a bit less because it's a little slower. That might even be an improvement, since I was probably using the Internet too much anyway.

> It matters for websites, but only after fixing many other problems with performance and usability.

Or does it? Once you fix major performance, usability problems and it starts to feel fast - other efforts become kind of pointless and may even become sources of performance, usability problems themselves.

It's important to remember that with the death of net neutrality in the US, this may not be the case forever.

I would compare it more to RSS vs. more complicated protocols like WebSub. HTTP/1.0, like RSS, isn't going away; and when you're a smaller player, it's really all you need. It's only the larger players that actually have requirements that make optimizations like HTTP/2 necessary for their operating expenses to stay sane, rather than just "nice-to-have but an unnoticeable blip on their margins."