For years now, we’ve been taught by Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to think of bandwidth as a limited resource to be carefully consumed. We purchase Internet speed plans with bandwidth caps - upload/download caps on transferrable data per month. It wasn't always this way, though - up until the 2010s most users paid for simple Internet access, and physical limitations on bandwidth like copper/phone line throughput sometimes functioned as a cap, but ultimately there was no meter on individual use because it wasn't necessary.
In the 2000s the US government gave a number of telecommunications companies billions of dollars and access to infrastructure in order to connect larger portions of the population to the Internet. Rather than execute the full rollout envisioned by the government, ISPs instead pocketed most of the subsidies and captured federal regulation. The infrastructure access and subsidies guaranteed monopolies in most urban markets, and ISPs simply ignored most rural rollout